Hey @dustin!
Thank you very much for the hot tips! Finally got around to starting on the book myself, and was met with issues when trying to set it all up on a brand new M1 pro MacBook. Mainly related to phoenix moving from npm to esbuild to manage assets with the newest version.
Regarding your second hot tip, I managed to get the project up and running on my m1 mac, without having to move back to my old intel macbook. 
This isn’t my first time tackling with node_sass compilation issues, as I work on JS projects at my day job. Without going too much in depth, I managed to get around it by rolling back to an earlier node and npm version. Specifically node v14.18.1 that uses npm v6.14.15. Node 16+ and npm 7+ “always” crashes on projects with node_sass dependencies. 
nvm install node v14Install node v14.18.1 with nvm in a rosetta terminal.- Swap back to a “m1 terminal” and cd into desired folder
nvm use v14mix phx.new pento --live
Then you should be able to move on to ecto.create and start on the book proper.
You could probably do everything in a rosetta terminal, but for some reason running my iTerm in rosetta mode adds a second delay to absolutely anything I do in there shrug
