Which books have you tried? I found “Elixir in Action” to be the key to understanding a lot of more advanced Elixir/Erlang/OTP concepts.

When I have finished the books Elixir in Action and Programming Elixir (after doing many exercises on exercism.org) I will move on to :

• Toy Robot - The Elixir Version [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle]

• Build a Weather Station with Elixir and Nerves: Visualize Your Sensor Data with Phoenix and Grafana by Alexander Koutmos, Bruce A. Tate, Frank Hunleth

Meanwhile or after finishing those projects I will start with learning Ecto and Phoenix. I have tried to read more then one Elixir study book at a time but that does not work for me. I have learned to focus on one thing at a time otherwise nothing will finish.

Just wanted to drop an update after three years :). I still haven’t found an Elixir day job, but I think my current situation is close.

On how to learn, nothing beats building something useful. Not tutorials or example apps. Just find something that you or someone else needs, and build it. Of course, tutorials, courses, books, are still useful as a starting point. But what I had to find was the point where you stop reading and start building.

After all this time I have built the site of Greece |> Elixir (which is the Greek Elixir community I founded and leading). I have built a Nerves app that checks if my plants need watering. Built a Soccer Cafe app to use with my son. You gather around a soccer game that updates online, with Presence and a chat, and you chat about the game. My son can invite his friends to the party . I built an app to manage common charges for buildings that I am using for the building where my apartment is.

And now, I have the opportunity to build an internal integration platform using Elixir/Phoenix, for my day job! This is the closest to actually using Elixir day to day.

It goes without saying that a lot of this was also enabled by our LLM friends. So things might have changed a bit compared to when I was asking 3 years ago.