@blazejcm , here’s my rough plan with the flash cards – create cards for:

• the core concepts for each chapter (and maybe some more advanced topics)
• key terms and definitions from each chapter
• module functions, like Enum

Completely separately, I’m pretty pumped with my progress so far. As a little side note, I’m the type of person who likes to have a solid overall understanding of how the pieces of something fit together before diving in to start learning. Some people are comfortable just picking something up and learning bit by bit, but that’s never been a satisfying way to learn for me.

So I’ve recently finished “Elixir in Action”, “Programming Ecto”, “Programming Phoenix 1.4”, “Phoenix in Action”, and the brand new (and as yet, unfinished), “Ash Framework”, by @kamaroly . (Aside: I want to start using Ash in January; very coincidentally, I picked up Eric Evan’s DDD book several months ago and was delighted to see so some overlap with DDD principles in Phoenix and Ash. I see so much potential to apply these principles in this ecosystem.)

I didn’t complete every exercise in all of these books because my goal was to get a sense of what’s important to pay attention to before rolling up my sleeves with coding exercises from the video courses, as well as to make some mental and physical notes about where I can find more info as I start building.

I just fired up PragDave’s course before posting here – I realized it’s been a while since I shared here so I just wanted to pop by and say “hi”.

Does learning a new programming language remind anyone of that feeling they used to get when they were gifted a new video game or console as a kid? It’s like I’m starting out on a brand new adventure that I know is going to be challenging, but also very fun and rewarding.

PragDave’s course - that’s a great choice, I finished it a few years ago, it’s really good.

And pattern matching is absolutely incredible.

I do miss some language features from Haskell (e.g. partial application) but I’m having a ton of fun with Elixir as well!

It’s different, that’s for sure! I’m feeling more comfortable with it today, and I think a couple of keys came from one of Dave’s course sections. In it, he specifies a couple of key things:

1. The left-hand side (LHS) is the pattern, not just a variable
2. For a pattern to match, the shape of the two sides must be the same, and literal values in the pattern have to match the corresponding values in the right-hand side (RHS).

Using a list’s head and tail in the LHS of a pattern can sometimes look weird when it appears there are more things in the RHS, but the more patterns I see and play around with, the more natural it’s starting to feel. You’re 100% right about persevering – it just takes some time and patience!

Completely separately, I just vibe coded a Phoenix app to help me master all of the Enum module functions. Here’s a quick screenshot that I think is pretty straightforward:

enum1200×741 40.7 KB

My goal with this is to get random exposure to different Enum functions and get hands-on experience writing them. My process is to read the documentation, search GitHub for some real-world implementations, and then go back and write and run the code.

Eventually, I’d like to add all of the different Elixir modules and their corresponding functions, but at this point in my learning journey it appears (at least according to Dave) that Enum is pretty essential for progressing further.

The code for this is in a local git repo, but I’ll try to make some time to push it upstream later today. I want to play around with some more functions, close/reopen my browser, and make sure things like persistence work before pushing it upstream. (Edit: I just noticed the “functions learned” tracker did not update after completing Enum.min_max/2, so this is an example of something i’d want to fix first. The docs formatting in the left panel is also very ugly.)

I’m also happy to share it as an open source project, but to anyone who reads this and checks out the repo when it’s available, please keep in mind that I’m not focused on Phoenix development quite yet, so I have not even looked at the code.

Once I start learning Phoenix I would be delighted for people to roast my code but since it’s not my focus right now I just don’t think I’d get much benefit from it. Happy to have my mind changed though!