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

Examples using branching


Now that we have gone through some of the basic syntax and ideas of our branching structures, let's attempt some problems that use these different expressions.

FizzBuzz

Nothing is complete without "Hello, World!", nor is anything complete without some variation of the FizzBuzz problem.

The FizzBuzz problem, if you're not familiar with it, is a small problem, interview question, or small programming exercise. It asks the programmer to iterate over the numbers 1 to 100, and print Fizz if the number is divisible by 3, print Buzz if the number is divisible by 5, print FizzBuzz if the number is divisible by both 3 and 5, or simply print the number.

If you've never heard of this problem, take a moment and try it before continuing.

We are going to quickly implement this in Elixir. We'll create an EXS file, aptly named fizzbuzz.exs. In it, we will create our FizzBuzz module, and define a print/0 function to perform our task:

defmodule FizzBuzz do
  def print() do
    1..100 |...