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For anyone curious about Phoenix and Elixir, I can sincerely recommend the following resources to get you started:

- Programming Phoenix by Chris McCord, Bruce Tate, and José Valim [1]

- The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao [2]

- Elixir in Action by Saša Jurić [3]

Phoenix initially attracted me to Elixir, I've stuck around for that and the OTP platform: pattern matching, process based concurrency (actor model), supervision, immutability, macros, and more.

"Elixir took the Erlang virtual machine, BEAM, and put a sensible face on it. It gives you all the power of Erlang plus a powerful macro system." – Dave Thomas

[1] https://startlearningelixir.com/r/programming-phoenix

[2] https://startlearningelixir.com/r/the-little-elixir-and-otp-...

[3] https://startlearningelixir.com/r/elixir-in-action

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Another great resource that was recently released is the Phoenix Inside Out series by Shankar: https://shankardevy.com/phoenix-book/

I just got it a few days ago and I'm about 30% into the first book. What I can say so far is that the author's approach resonates really well with me. Going through the book feels like sitting next to a colleague, who is introducing you to Phoenix and is really knowledgeable in the topic. The book is full of interesting tidbits and explanations about Phoenix internals without getting in the way. I also appreciate the TDD approach including both acceptance and unit testing. The most important thing for me though, is how Shankar condensed teaching Elixir into a single chapter. I have previously tried to study Elixir a few times with the intention of eventually getting into Phoenix but I always got overwhelmed by the OTP material. I didn't want to make the mistake of trying to learn Rails before being comfortable with Ruby again so I put off on learning Phoenix altogether. What Shankar has done is to dedicate one chapter to teach just enough Elixir for you to get started. This was perfect for what I needed and it was reassuring knowing exactly how much (or little) Elixir you need to know before diving into Phoenix.

If you have previous experience in another MVC framework and are interested in Phoenix I highly recommend this series (at least based on what I've read so far).

I should note that the current version of the book is targeting Phoenix v1.3.0-rc.2. Although Shankar has already made an announcement with the intention to update the book soon after the officially 1.3.0 release.

> If you have previous experience in another MVC framework and are interested in Phoenix I highly recommend this series (at least based on what I've read so far).

Do you need Elixir experiences too?

I've done MVC and have some functional experiences.

I've seen this book but wasn't sure if it was for me and decided to do exercism's elixir exercises before buying this book.

thanks

I think you should be fine, especially considering you have some functional experience. In the second chapter of the book, the author goes over Elixir from scratch. By the end of the chapter you should have a working knowledge of the language. Even beyond this chapter, the author takes time to dissect and explain the more complicated looking code. It really does feel quite approachable to anyone with a few years of programming experience.

What is Garuda? Just a random title? A library/component in the Elixir ecosystem?

It's a strange way to sell a book, when neither the web site selling the book nor googling seem to enlighten me.

From the web site: "Create a mini-Phoenix framework using Elixir and Cowboy. What can be the best way to understand Phoenix than to create it yourself."

Garuda, I'm sure after googling you found the Wikipedia entry for it. It is just a play on words since Garuda, like Phoenix, is a type of mythical bird.

Ah, I found the Wikipedia entry, but didn't make the connection with Phoenix. Thanks!

Yeah, he should probably change the title from Garuda to something else (even 'Garuda: Learn Phoenix by building it yourself' is better).

Tomte, "Garuda" is not a random title. As you and others have guessed it, Garuda is a mythical bird in Indian mythology just like Phoenix being a mythical bird in Greek mythology. Since the book is about "Demystify Phoenix Internals & Rebuild Phoenix Clone", I have named it as Garuda.

I agree with you, I could have explained the book's content and its title a bit more clearer on my website. I will do it sometime soon.

This is the best Elixir material I've used: https://pragmaticstudio.com/elixir

You build you a simple HTTP server using Elixir and learn a lot of the core language and architecture choices when writing Elixir code. It doesn't pester you with this is an int, this is a string. You just start building this HTTP server out and learn about Elixir along the way.

Learned a lot from the pragmaticstudio resource as well and couldn't recommend it highly enough.

+1 on "The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook". It's a generally good introduction to OTP, though the book has a lot more errors than I'm used to seeing (their github code differs without explanation from the code in the book at times, and sometimes one or the other won't run successfully).

Hey, are there already some tutorials / books for Phoenix 1.3? I found this [1], but it will be released in late december 2017. Any ideas / recommendations for the Phoenix 1.3? Folder structure and models (schemas) got changed quite a bit.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Phoenix-1-3-Productive-Re...

You might want to add that all those book links have an Amazon referral link attached which (presumably?) points to you.

Elixir in Action is a bit outdated, no?

I read it a while ago, but I remember it being pretty useful.

Some of the elixir bits are now out of date. (eg. it still has a section on Records)

But it touched on a lot of OTP topics that were missing from other places.

(this was before Benjamin Tan's book was finished)

At the time I remember Elixir in Action really made me finally understand the OTP concepts.

Just want to point out that Records are still part of the standard library, and can be important for integrating with Erlang code using records which you need to work with. Even though they are avoided in Elixir, because structs are better in every way, they are still alive and well in Erlang.

Thanks for the extra info.

For comparison, though, Dave Thomas' "Programming Elixir" doesn't even mention them.

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