Quite the opposite!

Most frameworks would have likely called this version 2.0 but we kept it as Phoenix 1.7 exactly because everything is still backwards compatible. Which other major web frameworks out there have not pushed breaking changes in 7.5 years?

Of course, Phoenix LiveView is before 1.0, so it doesn’t reap the benefits of major versioning yet, but even then we have been careful with deprecations while exploring a programming model with plenty of new ideas.

And Phoenix v1.7 is exactly the maturing of the ideas from the last 3 years. It is a bit early to expect plenty of learning materials while it is still a release candidate. And that would be true for most technologies. So just be a bit patient and those materials will come out.

Yeah, it’s a weird combination of lots of information being available but it all feeling pretty useless when you are new. People often just link the Hexdocs as if people hadn’t already found them and the Hexdocs only ever feel useful when you already know what the process you’re trying to is and just need a refresher. For first time learning they are pretty confusing as they don’t even tell you which location the code snippets should be in or what other locations need to be modified.

I started learning a few months ago and basically learnt everything from reverse engineering either the mix.phx.gen options, or from the few github projects I could find…and by literally typing random things in until something works. I firmly believe the monkey’s and typewriters saying is true based on the number of times I’ve managed to just luckily guess how things work in Phoenix because I couldn’t find the information.

On the plus side I only started learning Live a couple of days ago and managed to do the same things it took me a month to do using Controllers because I have a much better understanding of how everything connects together now.

This is imo the biggest hurdle for any educational material. LV has been a moving target for quite a while and I’m not sure if it’s yet at a point of slowing down. Sure it would be nice to have all the educational material available, but these things take time and effort – even the existing pieces do/did. It be great if someone stepped up to take this to the in depth level, but those efforts are hard to justify if things might be out of date in 6-8 month. In the best case it’s just stale content in the worst it’s actively confusing people, because different sources talk about different things.