I guess it's a good thing that people like it so much, but it's really starting to feel marketing-y by now.
That's a good sign!
You know why? Because it has a great community and is very friendly for new comers. Jose, Eric and the rest of the team made that a priority and it shows. It doesn't just mean being nice on IRC, it also means putting usability first, putting more effort in how example looks, how documentation looks and so on.
If Google invented a language then proceed to push and sponsor it, by paying authors to work on it, organizing marketing, hackathons etc, then it is hard to say if it popular because of Google's backing or because it has its own merits.
That's as hostile to newcomers as it gets. Contrast this with the Rust book, that gets you from "I have no idea how anything works" to "hey I just wrote a small program!" in a few minutes.
I learned Elixir totally from Getting started guide and then the documentation. Then for OTP, I have read an Erlang book to understand it well. Elixir's documentation is really awesome and one of the best I have seen.
[0] - http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html
Maybe using numbers for chapters, letters for sections, and a 1.A notation for the headers? At the least, adding the chapter numbers to the header, so it says "1. Introduction"? Putting the chapter numbers in the URL would help too. So would adding some highlighting in the right column index to indicate the location of the current page.
It seems like fantastic introductory material, but only if people can find it. Usually, the first thing do when I encounter a paginated manual like that is to search for a "single page" or "print" or "PDF" link. Is there one there that I couldn't find? If not, adding one might be a simple (partial) fix.
Edit: If others have more (and better) suggestions, they can be added to the issue I filed here: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir-lang.github.com/issues...
I've used these before when playing with it:
* http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html
* https://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1
* Asking on #elixir-lang on freenode IRC
Here is a specific chapter on distribution and nodes:
http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/mix-otp/distributed-t...
Their IRC channel, they were pretty helpful for me. And also I am sure they'd want to hear about your experience to also improve their docs and tutorials.
Case in point, LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) was created by one of the original designers of Erlang, Robert Virding, has great support for a small FOSS project, true macros, but the popularity of Ruby has rocketed Elixir way ahead in terms of repositories and users. Erlang Solutions has it on the site, but it is not as touted as Elixir. People go with what they know, and let's admit it, Lisp is a great language, but not as popular in the web-dev crowd sans Clojure (which I don't see as so Lispy).
From the early looks of it, having come from industry and academia, Pony lang looks poised to muscle in on Erlang/BEAM/OTP, Elixir and LFE anyway. I personally don't like the syntax, but syntax is not semantics, and you get over it.
Popularity doesn't always win the day if you do something a bit more off the main road, and potential to earn more researching what you love: Look at qdb/k devs and jobs, and Haskell has started increasing in uptake by fintech. Go with what you like, or as Joseph Campbell said, 'Follow your bliss' and the rest will fall into place.
But don't listen to me. I spend many waking moments fiddling with J (jsoftware.com). Not actually the most loved or known PL out there. I think the array languages J/APL/K/Q will have their day due to where software and hardware are heading: Multicores, array processing (GPU/FPGA hybrids, custom computers).
LFE had no documentation, no tools, no learning resources for a really long time. Compare that to Elixir that focused on those aspects since day one. Furthermore, LFE has reached 1.0 only recently, almost 1.5 years after Elixir, and that has an impact on industry adoption.
LFE also was, for a long time, literally Lisp-flavored Erlang while Elixir attempted from the beginning to bring its own abstractions such as protocols, collections, Unicode support, UTF-8 strings, and they are still pushing it forward: http://elixir-lang.org/blog/2016/07/14/announcing-genstage/
So I think you are selling both languages short. There is much more happening in Elixir besides the "popularity of Ruby" and there is a lot of potential in LFE now that they are focusing on being more than a "lispy" Erlang.