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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

"Friendly for newcomers"? I tried to write something the other day, and had an Erlang developer friend to help me. The Elixir docs section just says "buy one of these books to get started", which is completely unacceptable, and we (mostly my friend, as I had no idea what anything is) spent an hour trying to figure out how to run a node, with Google not providing any useful answers.

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.

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Elixir has a very good getting started guide[0]. I don't know if you have seen this or not. Even in the learning section, it recommends going through the getting started guide. It mentions other books in other resources. I don't know why you think it's hostile to new comers.

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

Jesus... I saw that page. What I didn't see is the "next" link at the very bottom, right above the footer :( There's a whole bunch of stuff I haven't read! That page should be better designed... I think I also skipped the sentence below "running scripts", the one that says "chapter 2", because I skimmed later and it was just "here's where you can ask questions".

I have no involvement in Erlang, but I just looked at that page, and as an outsider I would agree that the navigation could certainly be improved. I think a lot of the problem for me is that there is no distinction between the numbers for "Chapters" and for "Sections", and this confused me as to where I was in the progression.

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...

Oh sorry to hear that Stavros. Sometimes Erlang knowledge doesn't translate directly to Elixir, there are just a few conventions to keep in mind.

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.

Thanks, the problem was that I didn't notice the rest of the pages on the guide :( I thought there was only the "installation" page.

Elixir has good starting guide. I was able to easily pick up reading from it. Book are further resources to learn.

Thanks, I seem to have missed the fact that there are multiple pages on that guide. Weird, because I saw that page again just now and thought "how is two paragraphs a good guide?" before noticing the contents on the side...

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