Just read “Mapping Our Route” looks great! Glad to see so much literature regarding elixir is well written and not so dry and boring as what I am more accustomed to (specifically java/c++ books). Thanks for the hard work, will definitely be purchasing a copy.
asqrd
lance
Author of Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix
We don’t cover Ecto, but we do talk about techniques for persisting state - and getting it back again after a crash.
5
lance
Author of Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix
jasonu
First off, thank you Lance, you did a great job! 
Your book really expanded my understanding of how to use OTP behaviors such as gen_server and also Phoenix channels and presence.
After reading the book, I have a question. Does the design used for the Islands game lend itself to apps that focus mostly on CRUD operations? I think I could model the actions of creating, viewing, updating, and deleting database records with a functional state machine, but using a channel to send messages back and forth when there is only one client seems like overkill. Perhaps CRUD is the killer app for the stateless HTTP protocol?
Does Lance’s design really only make sense (in the context of a CRUD app) if you need to have multiple clients simultaneously updating data, e.g. a pair-programming text editor?
lance
Author of Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix
Hi Jason,
Glad you liked the book!
I’m not sure that CRUD vs non-CRUD is the most interesting distinction here. It seems to me that stateful vs. stateless will get us farther. We can assume that stateless means we’ll be writing working state to the database and then retrieving it for each request.
Most applications of any size or complexity have a number of elements that might lend themselves to either a stateful or a stateless approach.
We can certainly mix and match these different approaches within the same application, using each where it seems most natural. We can mix and match MVC style components and Channels in the same application as well, depending on the need.
With that in mind, the more interesting exercise to me is examining the domain and determining which approaches to use where. A twist to this is to think about why we might choose the stateless approach in a given situation. Is statelessness inherent to the domain element, or are we choosing it based on our previous experience and familiarity?
I don’t know that there are general answers for these questions. So much depends on circumstance and the particulars of the domain.
The fun part is that Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix give us the tools to experiment more easily with the statefull approach so we can learn more about how and when to use it.
axelclark
For those who have gone through the book, I took the React frontend example code and rewrote it in Vue. I didn’t have any experience with Vue before starting, so I’m sure there are many areas it could be improved. However, here is a link to the assets folder on Github if anyone is interested.
The book is awesome for anyone who is thinking about purchasing it!
oldpond
Once again, awesome book! Best book out right now IMHO on web development with elixir and phoenix!
AstonJ
How much Phoenix does it cover Michael? Could you jump straight into this without first having read Programming Phoenix?