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Comment by KingFelix | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing about Elixir/erlang besides following installs for apps. I have used it, installed via ASDF on my Raspberry pi since dependencies weren't up to date.

Can anyone provide a good place to start on where to get started with Elixir?

I tend to learn by working on stuff and not just reading etc, maybe a step by step in elixir? I am going into the literature now as well

Thanks in advance for any help!

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I learned by converting a simple Rails API that I had running to do one or two things into a Phoenix API. In my case, it was very eye opening both because it was basic ETL and because it was something that benefited from high concurrency.

I especially recommend this approach because it gives you more or less the most complete cross-section of some basic data structures, some web stuff, and some database stuff via their db adapter of choice, Ecto, which is excellent.

Each part can be a pretty steep (but fairly quick) adjustment depending on your background.

This is awesome, Cross-section is what I am also looking for.

Appreciate the input, thank you!

Don't forget to learn how to write a GenServer from scratch. I lot of people I've met who hop straight into Phoenix forget to learn the basics of GenServers (and processes in general).

Here's a stupid example I whipped up:

https://gist.github.com/amorphid/3dec7028b05bd10f6ff3180d199...

^^^ you wouldn't ever code it that way, but you should (in my opinion) know what each line of code is trying to do.

This is great, I have been teaching myself everything and there are a lot of day 1 things I learned way too late, this is extremely valuable, thank you!

My pleasure, I'd you want another Elixir reference examples, feel free to email me. Email in profile.

Programming Elixir[1] has hands-on exercises throughout. The author also published a video course[2] with exercises.

[1]: https://pragprog.com/book/elixir16/programming-elixir-1-6

[2]: https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...

Excellent! This is great thank you!

I'd definitely recommend the official getting-started guide, it's quite well-written and thorough: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html

I read Dave Thomas' book cover-to-cover like some kind of legitimate nerd :) It was very good.

For understanding genservers there's The Little Elixir and OTP Guidebook, as well.

In my case I experimented with it for at least a year before I decided to jump in, my "experiments" are here: https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-snippets (I tend to use single-file dev for exploring simple ideas; this is not a general pattern used in the community or anything, it's just something I discovered I could get by doing)

The How I Start guide was just updated for 1.9 http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1/index.html

Excellent, I saw this researching today as well, I will check it out.

Thank you!

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