Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter was also full of material, so let's take a quick moment to recap some of the material we covered.

We discussed how modules are defined, their purpose, and a little about their representation.

We went over functions, more about them as types, more explicitly into how they are defined, and the difference between anonymous (unnamed) functions versus named functions.

Along the lines of functions, we discussed pattern matching more and how it can be used to solve problems.

Using patterns, we also discussed guard statements and what functions or checks are available to us when using guards.

We also introduced Elixir's build tool, mix, and how we can use it to create projects, and we started our first few projects.

Along with projects and mix, we introduced a few cool features with respect to testing available to us via mix and Elixir.

So far, we introduced the functional building blocks required to create programs and applications in Elixir. Next, we will want to see how we can improve...