Interim-review (continued in post below)
It’s summer here and as I try not being glued to my desk all day, I needed a book to read where it wasn’t strictly necessary to follow along with the examples. I chose this book after what @peerreynders said in his post above 
I’m only 60% of the way through this book (chapters 1-6 as per Peer’s recommendation, and will be going back to Programming Phoenix now - edit - I actually ended up finishing the book as I was enjoying it so much! See the rest of my review in the post below…) but I just wanted to post a mini-review to say I’m really really really loving this book! It’s been one of the most enjoyable Elixir books I’ve read so far. Why? Because it’s sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo easy to read!! 
There are a number of reasons for this, in part it is because of the pace and well thought out progression of topics, but the thing I really appreciated, is that it seems to have been produced with those of us who use e-readers in mind; there’s absolutely no having to flick back through pages to review code that is spoken about. Code is either just before or just after it’s covered or (and I really appreciate this…) repeated if it is spoken about again. The output is also included, eradicating the need to actually follow along as the results are there in front of you. On top of that, since everything is well explained and at an even pace, the cognitive load required to progress through the book is relatively low if you already know the basics of SQL. All this makes reading on e-readers frustration free and a real joy.
The other thing I really like about this book is that it acts as a bit of a SQL refresher (in fact so far my only suggestion would have been to run with this and cover more SQL and how to do it with Ecto - though I’m guessing the remainder of the book may do some of that anyway).
The other reason I like this book is because it (perhaps obviously) showcases what’s so great about Ecto. Ecto has been put together very nicely and I like that it follows the Elixir theme of keeping magic to a minimum. The query syntax is pretty close to SQL query syntax, and I think this will make converting SQL to Ecto a lot easier than trying to do the same in other DB libraries or ORMs such as Active Record. It will also mean if you ever need to drop into raw SQL it should be a bit easier.
So my thoughts so far are… get this book!! It’s so incredibly easy to read that I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it just as much as I am!
Well done Eric and Darin! 
