Elixir In Action Book Club!

Super happy to be here. Looking forward to discuss and learn from y’all. Apologies in advance for the upcoming stream of (friendly) reminders

I will mostly be reading on Fri/Sat and posting on Wednesdays!

I loaded the book on to my phone last night and read the excellent foreword by @FrancescoC, where he says when he asked José what problem he was trying to solve José said that he wanted to bring the power of Erlang to other communities. Francesco goes on to say he had put the same question to many other language creators but José was the first to say his focus was on the adoption of ideas, semantics, and run-time (of the extremely powerful Erlang) and he did it by approaching the problem with a different syntax, tools, and development approach.

In more simpler terms (and something many of us have been saying on places like the forum) his goal was to essentially make the power of Erlang as accessible as possible to people who have learnt or have become accustomed to what some might consider ‘modern’ languages and frameworks, such as Ruby and Rails.

I’m glad Francesco got it directly out of the horses mouth and when people ask this question in future I will point them to this post!

_{PS, if anyone is interested here is my review of the original edition of this book: Elixir In Action (Manning) - #2 by AstonJ}

Hi all! Looking forward to hearing from everyone on their journey through Elixir In Action!

The way I’m approaching the book’s latest edition is bound to be different from the way I approached Elixir books many years ago, back when I was just getting started with Elixir.

Nevertheless, I’m certain there will be much to learn from the book, alongside many great reminders of the core truths of the platform. I’ll be sure to document my journey through the chapters here in the thread!

Just like the foreword from Francesco Cesarini and the preface by Saša Jurić point out, the fundamentals of OTP are not only the stable foundation upon which Elixir builds upon, but also one of the key differentiators and reasons why Elixir (and the broader Erlang ecosystem) is different from many other languages. Truly understanding the OTP way of building software is what truly unlocks Elixir’s full potential, and the truths about that never go out of fashion

What are you looking forward to gaining from the book?

I had read the first version of this book when I was learning Elixir, I was a reviewer for the second version of this book. For this third version I have a different thing in mind.

I have been hearing a lot that “Elixir is a difficult language for beginners” - I vocally disagree with that. One of my things to do this year was to produce some beginner friendly Elixir texts.

My goal for reading this third incarnation of this book would be to revisit Elixir with a pedagogical point of view. And chatting with like minded folks and hearing their opinions and learning from their experiences - chapter by chapter.

Aside from that, this is one of the three books that helped me become a better programmer so I will be party to a book club even when it is for the 10th edition.

What are the other two?

One is “Joy of Clojure” the other one is actually a whole website but the book Domain Modeling made Functional is a great book and one I read multiple times.

Update: I no longer work with Clojure and I was never really an F# dev but I used concepts of those to enrich my reasoning about pieces of codes. Also, all these resources take a very pragmatic approach at describing things without being too academic, that’s a style I really enjoy reading.

I partially read the first edition of this book and am taking the opportunity to try and make it all the way through now that the third edition is out. I struggle to finish books like this, even when they are as well written and useful as EiA. My hope is that by joining a book club I can keep myself accountable to push through when other shiny things are tempting me away

As for what I hope to learn, I’m keen to deepen my understanding of the concurrent side of Elixir and learn more about maintaining production BEAM applications.

I have both prior versions of this book and have worked a little with the Erlang on which Elixir is based. It will be interesting to see what additional ideas I can glean from the book this time around. Hopefully, the regular pacing of a book club reading and the discussions here lead to deeper understanding.

This is my first book club here. The opening post encouraged posting once per chapter. But, what is the expected pacing for chapters? Is that one chapter per week or some other faster or slower frequency? I want to make sure my expectations are aligned.

@code-shoily has said he’ll be posting weekly updates but there are no hard or fast rules Tim, just go at your own pace and post your thoughts or get involved with discussions as and when you can

The mighty @bjorng will be joining as well!

I’m sure I won’t be the only one interested in hearing his thoughts on Elixir while working his way through the book