New to Elixir

Hello and welcome! I hope you enjoy it here.

I am not sure if you want to stick to books only but Elixir’s official tutorial is very solid, one of the best I ever stumbled upon.

That, plus the Exercism.IO Elixir track will make you more than ready to read and write Elixir.

Of course, things like Ecto and Phoenix are universes in themselves but they are very approachable and the community here is supportive and helps people get into them as well.

The book Elixir in Action was very helpful to me when I was learning Elixir. The Pragmatic Studio is also great for video tutorials + sample projects.

And don’t underestimate the HexDocs for Elixir, Ecto, Phoenix, LiveView, and any other libraries you might be using. You’ll often find full tutorials for common use cases right there in the docs.

Welcome @light . You say you’re ‘fairly new to programming’, so (depending on how new exactly) it’s worth being aware that Elixir is (I’m pretty sure) most often picked up by people with a fair bit of experience in other languages. This isn’t because it’s notably difficult (it’s really not!), but just a matter of its not being as well known as more common ‘beginner’ languages like python and javascript (the latter, by the way, is a much more difficult language to learn well than Elixir).

I point this out just so you’re aware that many of the resources available, and that people may point you to, could seem to be pitched above your level. If that’s so, move on to something else, or (if you’re someone willing to head-butt your way through more difficult material), keep asking questions. I’m also new (to Elixir, not to programming), but from what I’ve seen the Elixir community is largely kind & helpful.

To any others reading this - are you aware of any Elixir resources beyond Joy of Elixir pitched at newish programmers?

Welcome!
The greatest tip for learning anything in programming and computers is to always build stuff and tinker around, does not matter how big or small, just do it!

I would also like to add the ElixirSchool and Learn With Me: Elixir.

The Exercism is a great place to pratice the language while solving problems!

Hey!
I actually ordered about 4 books related to Elixir just yesterday,
the books are: Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6: Functional |> Concurrent |> Pragmatic |> Fun, Elixir in Action, Designing Elixir Systems With OTP: Write Highly Scalable, Self-healing Software with Layers, Learn Functional Programming with Elixir: New Foundations for a New World (The Pragmatic Programmers)

Welcome and have fun!

If this is really your first language, you should not read “Elixir in Action” and “Designing Elixir Systems” yet, the last book I do not know.

Be aware that you are learning a functional language, I do not know of anyone that picked a functional language as their first language, but I think that could be a really good thing. I regret that it took me decades to really use a functional language.

The main difference to “normal” languages is, that you can not mutate data at will anywhere in memory. You can only transform data incoming to a function and return sth different. With this you obviously have less power, but you get the benefit of easier to understand and easier to test code (you can read a line of code, knowing that nothing magic happens somewhere else).

But: if you search for solutions to problems (on stackoverflow eg) you will most of the time find solutions that use mutable data. You can’t apply them directly in Elixir.

Hi Sebb,
As far as I have read the last book is aimed towards juniors-intermediate levels so it seems like an okay resource to study from as well, on top of my Joy of Elixir copy and other sites that people had mentioned here
I was told by a few that because I was not exposed to any OOP principals and languages in general it may be a benefit for me to wrap my head around FP faster.

Also, if you are referring by “can not mutate data at will” to the immutability part of Elixir then I was already sort of exposed to that, however, I must say that it seems to have it’s use cases.

for sure!
Just be aware that most of the world is OOP and mutable.