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Comment by jhgg | Hacker News Reader

For anyone jumping into Elixir/Erlang, here's a few great books you should look into:

    * Learn You Some Erlang  http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
    * Erlang in Anger http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/
    * Programming Elixir 1.2 https://pragprog.com/book/elixir12/programming-elixir-1-2

For working with larger scale Elixir apps, a working knowledge on the erlang vm/beam.smp & OTP is vital to your success!

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Actually, while I appreciate that "Programming Elixir" gets a lot of airtime, owning both books I believe that "Elixir in Action" is a much better resource than the former. "Programming Elixir" takes a pedantic, cover-all-bases, step-by-step approach with many of the gotchas not obvious at first, while the latter just dives in with idiomatic code and gets much more quickly to the "jewels" of the language, namely that which benefits from BEAM/OTP.

Not to denigrate Dave Thomas, just to say that being first is not always best. My personal experience, from an imperative background, is that the "Action" book is more terse, but ultimately offers a cleaner schema of the language.

Side note: I love Elixir.

True enough, I have read both (actually the 1st edition of "Programming Elixir"), and "Elixir in Action" is more hands-on. The reader ends up working on an actual project along the book, adding new functionalities.

However, since Elixir 1.2, some of "Elixir in Action" is now outdated, especially the use of HashDict replaced by Map.

I have not read the second edition of "Programming Elixir" though. Based on the table of contents it seems to be a bit more "applied" than the previous edition.

Agreed - I was just today seeing that my edition of the book still pushes the hashdict. Perils of early adoption! Still, kudos to both and my advice to all peeps looking at Elixir (and you should!) is to buy both.

There is a post from the author that documents what has diverged between Elixir in Action and Elixir 1.2. More than simply updating code examples, it actually gives context around all of the changes.

http://theerlangelist.com/article/eia_elixir_12

Should be noted that `Erlang in Anger` is available for free. It is a great book. And I agree, understanding Erlang is invaluable when working on real world projects with Elixir. The release process is still very 'erlangish', and knowing how the BEAM work is also important.

A free resource that covers the basics and advanced topics of Elixir and OTP: https://elixirschool.com (Available multiple languages)

Full disclosure: I'm the primary author.

Elixirs IRC is also a great place to ask questions. Really warm and active community that have helped me quite a bit while I was learning Elixir (still am).

https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#elixir-lang

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