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Comment by 120bits | Hacker News Reader

As a beginner, who has never touched Elixir, where should I start? My issue is tutorials NEVER have production quality code. How do know what my code structure looks like? How does linking works? If I/m using database, how can I use connection pooling. Stuff like that. I can look up the basics, but I have always struggled to learn how use X language in production. But I guess this is can applied to any programming language.

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First thing I'd do is go through the Getting Started guide on the main page: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html to get a feel for Elixir. For setting up an Elixir environment, I'd use ASDF - this guide is good: https://gist.github.com/rubencaro/6a28138a40e629b06470 - but the getting started guide's instructions will work too. The easiest editor for Elixir is probably VSCode with the ElixirLS extension.

After tinkering around in IEX and doing the Getting Started Guide, I'd do Dave Thomas's course (https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...) and read Elixir in Action by Sasa Juric. Dave Thomas's course will get you through the basics of the language and the important concepts step by step. Elixir in Action will go further into the concurrency model that makes Elixir unique.

Finally if you want to build a web app I'd go through the Phoenix Guides: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html#content . Those guides will give you a good example of what a real Elixir/Phoenix Web Application looks like using a database with pooling and request concurrency out of the box. The Programming Phoenix book will take that further (https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4).

If you want more practice writing functions and algorithms I'd recommend Exercism's Elixir track: https://exercism.io/tracks/elixir or Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net).

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