radar
Joy of Elixir (self-published) (free)
by Ryan Bigg
Joy of Elixir came about because I saw that there was not very much when it comes to absolute beginner material for learning Elixir. There's the excellent Getting Started guide on elixir-lang.org and the Programming Elixir book, but those feel like they're more targeted towards experienced programmers. They teach Elixir with a lot of assumed knowledge about programming languages. They're great books, but they're only great books for experienced programmers.
There's also the wonderful Elixir School site that serves well as a reference guide to the features of Elixir, but what newbies really need is a gentler introduction to Elixir.
Joy of Elixir avoids assuming you know anything about programming while teaching you about your first programming language: Elixir.
It seemed like there is a vast, empty, cavernous void where there should be something like the excellent Learn to Program book by Chris Pine. That book is for another programming language called Ruby; but there feels like there should be an equivalent to that for Elixir.
We have people completely new to programming wanting to learn Elixir -- because people who have learned Elixir already told them about it and how cool it is! -- but the support is not-quite-there yet. So this is an attempt to fill that void. Essentially a response to: "Why won't somebody think of the newbies?". Well, someone is thinking of the newbies.
I want Joy of Elixir to be the go-to-resource for teaching people (yes, that means you!) programming for the very first time using Elixir. I want you to experience the joy that Elixir (and programming in general) can bring to people. I want you to feel like they have power over the machine because of the knowledge contained within this book.
I want you to feel competent as our future's potential computer programmers. I want you to feel like you can become a programmer. This isn't stuff a "chosen few" can do. You're capable of learning this too.
Companion blog post: Joy of Elixir - Ryan Bigg
If you find any mistakes within the book, please follow the instructions over here About - Joy of Elixir to let me know about them.
Thanks for reading!
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radar
Not only is it free to read online, but it is also open source: GitHub - radar/joyofelixir: A gentle introduction to the Elixir programming language · GitHub.
The repo is a Jekyll site and so you’ll need Ruby installed to run it, but the setup is very easy to do.
If you want to view this book offline then I would recommend cloning the repository and then running it locally.
Alternatively: if you want it in dead-tree form: The Book - Joy of Elixir combines all the available chapters into one web page and then from there you could print it out.
radar
I’ve just published an update about Joy of Elixir to my personal blog: https://ryanbigg.com/2018/08/joy-of-elixir-progress-update.
The TL;DR of this is:
- I’m back to writing this book in my full-time after writing yet another book first
- I’m hoping to have the chapter on
Filecomplete by the end of the week - I have big plans for the remainder of the book, including a project involving reading from CSV files and automated testing
Thanks all who’ve read / recommended Joy of Elixir so far 
I’ve really loved hearing the great feedback from anyone who’s gone through it already. It gives me such a large amount of confidence going forward.
radar
Just a few more chapters planned:
- Chapter 12: a short one about how to find more functions or to bring up the documentation in
iex. Things like tab-complete, and theh,iandvhelpers. - Chapter 13: Introduction to Mix. Including modules, and touching on automated testing.
- Chapter 14: Building that CSV-reading project I mentioned step-by-step using all the skills we’ve learned so far in the book
- Appendix C: “Where to from here” - links to recommended resources for people to read after this book
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