Mastering Elixir (Self-published / Packt)

kokolegorille · September 10, 2018, 1:33pm

by André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Leverage the power of Elixir programming language to solve practical problems associated with scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fill this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a full-fledged application.

In this book you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang’sOTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer or GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master Supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then, you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon finishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by both learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.

Table of Contents

1: PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY AHEAD
2: INNARDS OF AN ELIXIR PROJECT
3: PROCESSES – THE BEDROCK OF CONCURRENCY AND FAULT TOLERANCE
4: POWERED BY ERLANG/OTP
5: DEMAND-DRIVEN PROCESSING
6: METAPROGRAMMING – CODE THAT WRITES ITSELF
7: PERSISTING DATA USING ECTO
8: PHOENIX – A FLYING WEB FRAMEWORK
9: FINDING ZEN THROUGH TESTING
10: DEPLOYING TO THE CLOUD
11: KEEPING AN EYE ON YOUR PROCESSES

What You will Learn

Use Elixir tools, including IEx and Mix

Find out how an Elixir project is structured and how to create Umbrella applications

Discover the power of supervision trees, the basis for fault-tolerance

Create a domain-specific language (DSL) which abstracts complexity

Create a blazing-fast web interface for your application with Phoenix

Set up an automatic deployment process for the cloud

Monitor your application and be warned if anything unexpected happen

Authors:

André Albuquerque is a software engineer at Onfido, after working in the banking industry for seven years. He has a master’s degree from Instituto Superior Técnico in distributed systems and software engineering, and, during his banking detour, he obtained a master’s degree in economics. He is currently developing Onfido’s microservices using Elixir and Ruby, learning every day about how applications can score and scale if we apply the correct tools and sound coding practices from the get-go. In his time off, he loves to build his own keyboards, play basketball, and spend time with his wife and son.

Daniel Caixinha is a software engineer at Onfido, where he is using Elixir to build resilient systems that can also handle the high growth of the business. After graduating from Instituto Superior Técnico, he joined the startup world, mainly using Ruby, but also got the chance to play around with Elixir. Upon joining Onfido, he got the chance to take Elixir more seriously, which made him fall in love with functional programming in general, and Elixir in particular. Besides building Elixir applications, he is fostering the use of Elixir, being also a member of the Lisbon Elixir meetup.

A new resource, it seems…

I did not read it (yet?). Anyone?

peerreynders · September 10, 2018, 1:52pm

https://medium.com/@dcaixinha

https://medium.com/@amalb

Packt books are hit and miss - the $10 sale is the right time to try something you are curious about - at the price of an expensive magazine.

This one is kind of interesting: Learning Functional Programming in Go

Also for pre-order: Learn Type Driven Development @yawaramin

sandymatt · September 11, 2018, 4:17am

This is definitely an intermediate book. I’m about half way through and am learning a great deal. From my notes, here are some of the more intermediate things:

(D)ETS
Supervision Trees
Dynamic Supervisors
GenStage
Typespecs and Behaviours

And that’s in the first 5 chapters. For me, I’m going to read it through twice to digest it all well.

I’d also recommend looking at “Phoenix Web Development”, also from Packt. That’s also intermediate to advanced, covering Channels, Presence, ETS, making a chat room, and so on. A lot of good books have been arriving lately.

kokolegorille · September 11, 2018, 9:50am

It seems it is even possible to get both… in combo pack.

Zesky665 · September 11, 2018, 5:33pm

Anyone have a promo code for this?

peerreynders · September 11, 2018, 6:13pm

None required - you just have to make an account with them.

AstonJ · September 11, 2018, 6:27pm

We’ve discussed Packt resources before - it seems they are something like Udemy, the comments in this thread might help:

Not sure how we should classify their items tbh - maybe a single thread that lists all Packt books?

sandymatt · September 11, 2018, 6:44pm

I’ve had good luck with Packt books. The 2 mentioned here, Mastering Elixir and Phoenix Web Development, are solid and thorough. The writers have enormous experience.

I’ve also gotten many data science books and js framework ones at packt, usually on sale. As with other publishers there are hits and misses. But most of the time I learn a good deal. $10 for a 400 page book? That’s a heck of a bargain, and far better than wasting thousands at some grad school where they teach basically the same thing.

As for Udemy, I’ve gotten good courses and learned a lot. I never pay more than $10, and there’s a 30 day guarantee. Both of those help.

zinclozenge · September 11, 2018, 7:19pm

I picked both of them up cause they were cheap. Mastering Elixir looks really good, the phoenix one look solid as well, at least just by looking at the topics.

amalbuquerque · October 15, 2018, 11:20pm

Hi all. I’m one of the authors of Mastering Elixir. It’s really good to know you guys are enjoying the book. We tried to write a book that would talk about the full Elixir development experience, from the creation of the project until the very end, when you deploy and monitor your application.

Hope you guys enjoy it, it was a difficult but ultimately rewarding experience.

kokolegorille · November 26, 2018, 9:25am

Does anyone knows where the ElixirDrip.Storage.Workers.QueueWorker is implemented? The module is mentionned in chapter 5, but seems to be missing.

Thanks for taking time.

peerreynders · November 26, 2018, 1:39pm

github.com

dcaixinha/ElixirDrip/blob/4b2df785ead36bb7bc6f1761433eb9dada476751/apps/elixir_drip/lib/elixir_drip/storage/workers/queue_worker.ex

defmodule ElixirDrip.Storage.Workers.QueueWorker do
  use     GenServer
  require Logger

  def start_link(name) do
    GenServer.start_link(__MODULE__, [], name: queue_name(name))
  end

  def queue_name(name) do
    name = name
           |> Atom.to_string()
           |> String.capitalize()

    Module.concat(__MODULE__, name)
  end

  def init(queue) do
    Logger.debug("#{inspect(self())}: QueueWorker started.")

    {:ok, queue}

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dcaixinha · April 24, 2019, 10:39am

Hey guys, sorry but I just found this topic now I’m one of the authors of the book.

I’ll become more active in this forum from now on, so any questions around the book please post here

For future reference, the official repo of the book is this: GitHub - PacktPublishing/Mastering-Elixir: Mastering-Elixir, published by Packt
Here you can have the breakdown of files per chapter.

There’s also the ElixirDrip org in GitHub, which contains the final application we build throughout the book: GitHub - elixirdrip/ElixirDrip

Packt · May 8, 2019, 12:11pm

Leverage the power of Elixir programming language to solve practical problems associated with scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability with Mastering Elixir published by Packt.

What you will learn:

Use Elixir tools, including IEx and Mix
Find out how an Elixir project is structured and how to create Umbrella applications
Discover the power of supervision trees, the basis for fault-tolerance
Create a domain-specific language (DSL) which abstracts complexity
Create a blazing-fast web interface for your application with Phoenix
Set up an automatic deployment process for the cloud
Monitor your application and be warned if anything unexpected happens

Authors :
André Albuquerque is a software engineer at Onfido, after working in the banking industry for seven years. He has a master’s degree from Instituto Superior Técnico in distributed systems and software engineering, and, during his banking detour, he obtained a master’s degree in economics. He is currently developing Onfido’s microservices using Elixir and Ruby, learning every day about how applications can score and scale if we apply the correct tools and sound coding practices from the get-go.

Daniel Caixinha is a software engineer at Onfido, where he is using Elixir to build resilient systems that can also handle the high growth of the business. Upon joining Onfido, he got the chance to take Elixir more seriously, which made him fall in love with functional programming in general, and Elixir in particular. Besides building Elixir applications, he is fostering the use of Elixir, being also a member of the Lisbon Elixir meetup.

kodepett · February 18, 2022, 10:02pm

Hey, I recently bought a copy of the book, it’s a great book and absolutely love it.

I’m wondering if there are any plans to update the book to cover the latest version of Elixir & Phoenix.
Currently on lesson 2, it’s been a great experience.

Kudos for the great work.

amalbuquerque · March 2, 2022, 11:46am

hi @kodepett , thanks for the feedback. Updating the book to a recent Elixir + Phoenix version would be awesome, but so far we don’t have any plans to do so. I will update this thread if we have any news about that. Thank you!