The third edition of Elixir in Action has just been released and we’ve teamed up with our friends at Manning to give you the chance to win one of TEN eBooks!
How to win
Simply tell us one thing you love about Elixir or the book in this thread and the first 10 people to comment WIN!
For those who miss the opportunity you can get 45% off for a limited time with the coupon code ELXDEV24. For those who need their arm twisting, check out what everyone has been saying about the book in its official thread here: Elixir In Action (Manning)
What’s not to love, from the language to Phoenix. In Elixir, my favorite feature is probably pattern matching and right now I’m learning about GenServers and I can’t wait to implement them in one of my projects.
The community around Elixir and the entire BEAM ecosystem has been the most welcoming, warm and educational out of all the professional circles I’ve spent time in. Everything about it makes one want to contribute back and to grow the supportive community even further. The author of the book, Saša Juric, is a great example of how someone extremely talented and knowledgeable can also be very kind and supportive. And he’s definitely not the exception in the Elixir community
I love the basis of Elixir: the BEAM. It is a great foundation to solve parallel tasks in a natural way. I am still at the beginning of my learning session.
From technological standpoint, I love elixir because it is oriented on developer experience and happiness, under the hood details are abstracted away from the user (a lot of programming languages should learn from this) and you can focus on your business requirements to build fast a great and robust product.
This can only be beaten by the great community it offers. Conscious and welcoming people, that not only are always here to help you, but also to discuss on how to build great software or overcome real-world problems.
Elixir is the first language I’ve ever used that makes me actually smile when I look back at the code I’ve written. I don’t really understand it, but I’m hoping it doesn’t wear off the more I use it.
From the book I love the table! where one column is a complex tech stack, and in the other column there’s Erlang. From the language in general, I love how easy Elixir makes it to reason about concurrent systems.
I really like the receptivity of the Elixir community and the interesting solutions offered by the language to make solving complex concurrency problems simple, for example. Furthermore, the language documentation is very robust, which makes learning the language easier.
The simple concurrency of Phoenix was what brought me here (it was a requirement for a project). Immutability and pattern matching got me hooked. What really got me, though, is how Erlang is the only the general purpose programming language I know that was born out of a hard business requirement. The pragmatism and very small surface area really clicks with me.
The language just fits my brain very well! I don’t know if it’s the functional aspect, the syntax, or the idioms – but it makes thinking about problems easier for me
I still remember the first time I learned Elixir around 3 years ago. My friend held a table from this book comparing two different projects to my face - one using a bunch of different, well-renowned technologies, and the other one with similar features, but all built using Elixir/Erlang. This was my initial motivator to get learning Elixir, the second one was the pipe operator (how this one thing makes memorizing the entire API so easy).
Today, I’m a full-stack Elixir developer, messing with both hardware and software @ work, so my sincere thanks to @sasajuric for changing the course of my life. Congratulations on the new edition of the book.
I love elixir because it makes functional programming approachable and fun (which i never thought i would say following SML many cough years ago!).
It enables you to do easily what other languages can’t do well or even at all e.g. distributed, very fault tolerant, very robust and stable with gen servers and a great community that produce many great libraries to extend its basic features. Must mention macro’s - wow what a game changer they are too!!
I have version 1 of this book (and many other elixir books) and it is a fab book, approachable, readable, very well written by Sasa, great for a read though and as a reference! Its never far from my desktop when coding elixir because it covers so much so concisely.
