Chapters 12 and 13 were bittersweet.
I aim to give a more detailed breakdown of chapters 9 - 13 a little later, BGG.
(Which means I’ll likely leisurely reread them for the nth time.)
The reason 12 and 13 are bittersweet is because they are very well structured, esp true for 12, and they’re good at what they are ostensibly intended to do.
12 gives you an entry into building distributed systems and directs you to where you need to go in order to make them more robust, sophisticated and pragmatic.
13 is more of a tour of tools, and really let’s you now that (in I’d say around two instances I’ve highlighted a line of code and just asked “what is this??”). The chapter gets away with it because it is replete with directions for where to find more information to expound on the material covered in the chapter.
Despite the fact that it is a tour-of-a-chapter, the first half very much puts you in a position to at the very least set-up local and remote releases, as well as interact with them.
That being said 12 and 13 drove home the fact that there is much more to building and maintaining distributed systems, which I expected. I understood, from prior cursory reading, that these were large topics, but I had hope for some unreasonably out-of-the-box quick fixes.
You can, and do, build a web server from the ground up using this book.
(Should you feel a little uncomfortable with the basic aspects of programming in Elixir, you can look at the book Programming Elixir, as it contains many exercises, and discusses much of fundamentals at length and from another perspective.)
Nothing wrong with even building a distributed application from this (which you do tbh), and encountering the stumbling blocks alluded to in these chapters, as it will serve as an opportunity to abstract away a lot of the context of the book and solidify the knowledge gained from reading.
I plan on doing the very same BGG.
I am not in a hurry to build a distributed system right now, but this is one of my main goals in coming to elixir; another being mastery and effective use of its Macro system. for which, @sasajuric has a brilliant guide. I will be reading Metaprogramming Elixir, BGG, to see if knowledge from Sasa’s guides can be augmented there.
How I read the book:
Speed read.
Comprehensive read (just understanding what I read with notes on what is unclear) Intention is of course to use the book as a reference when building other projects, so as to gain an abstract (applied) understanding of the topics covered in the book.
This is a very valuable book, and I don’t think my praise of it’s contents really does it justice.
You don’t just get elixir info in this book, you get some very nice programming practices and deep appreciation for what is actually happening behind the scenes which makes problem solving and strategising much less awkward and daunting.
Happy Sunday.
