Effective Learning approaches for Elixir Beginners

Questions / Help
1

Perhaps this question has been asked in the past (I am new to the forum), but as I get started with Elixir, I am curious about the learning approach that worked best for you when starting.

I understand we learn differently, and internalizing core concepts is a multi-factor process, but if you ever struggled to get on board with the language (especially given it resides in the functional paradigm), how did you make learning strides? This goes to both beginners and experts.

As a note, I have read extensively about elixir and its ecosystem. It is very promising for the web domain, and I love dedicated and passionate community that steadily growing.

My learning goal: to leverage on it’s fault tolerance and concurrency strengths to build web apps that can scale. And also because Phoenix LiveView offers an interesting way of approaching UI.

My Starting Point: Currently taking The Pragmatic Studio’s Elixir/OTP course, which is very comprehensive and insightful.

Also Reading Dave Thomas & Jose Valim’s Programming Elixir Book (2018)

Any pointers will be appreciated. Thanks

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2

I really like Dave Thomas’s book. I also like Elixir School because it can be easily accessed (ie, free) and it is full of great content.

I don’t remember having a problem with Elixir’s functional features as I was coming from Clojure. And I had studied LISP as an undergraduate student.

The was an Elixir Mix podcast episode with me on Elixir Education: EMx 106: Elixir Education with Adolfo Neto. The panel discussed several interesting issues.

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I started with the Elixir Guides to get it’s basic building blocks and I and really like the aproach take there.
I also used the resources mentioned by @adolfont and read the @sasajuric book too, Elixir in Action and loved it, I am really recommend the read.

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I second @adolfont on Dave Thomas’ book, I remember it helped me in the beginning :+1:

Elixir’s own “Getting Started” and the documentation were my first and main resources in the beginning.

As @Cleidiano have said, I’ve heard from many people good things about Saša Jurić’s book “Elixir in Action”, I didn’t have the chance yet to read it but seems to be an amazing resource. Leaving you with a great introductory talk from the author on the Elixir ecosystem:

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Hi @mainasam you seem to be on the right track :star2: The Programming Elixir book helped me a lot in understanding recursion with elixir.

All of the resources previously listed are fantastic start/complementary ways to go by; whatever your approach I highly recommend reinforcing the topic with the actual docs in iex.

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I did Prag Studio Elixir/OTP course, read Elixir in Action, watched conference talks, listened to podcasts and did problems on exercism, codewars, etc. Then did the free Phoenix course from Prag Studio.

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Thank you all for the insights and pointers…I will add that onto my current path. I am learning so much with this functional approach.

The first thing that stood out when I started was the data transformation that functions help achieve.

Then came pattern matching. And that’s what I’m currently implementing as I create a web server.