Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpeck | Hacker News Reader

For anyone looking to learn more about Elixir/Erlang, here's a dump of links that I posted recently to the local Atlanta Elixir Meetup group.

Roughly in the order I'd recommend consuming them.

Dave Thomas - Power of Erlang, Joy of Ruby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lww1aZ-ldz0

Dave Thomas Elixirconf Keynote - Think Different- http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening-...

elixir-lang.org tutorial - http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html

Programming Elixir - https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

Awesome Elixir - Curated list of great libraries - https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Elixir In Action - http://www.manning.com/juric/

Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good - http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

Erlang and OTP In Action - http://www.manning.com/logan/

I haven't had a chance to read McCords new book, but having read his code and interacted with him a fair bit in #elixir-lang the last few months I can only assume I'll be adding it to the bottom of this list as an important intermediary step to becoming proficient in Elixir along with learning OTP.

Also checkout How I Start Elixir http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1 and Erlang http://howistart.org/posts/erlang/1

This is a great list. I appreciate this. I have to add that your last entries are really important. Elixir is great, but I'm finding more and more that I have to dig into Erlang to do many, many things, because Elixir doesn't have that many libraries yet. Things like basic hashing have to be done using Erlang, so knowing the Erlang standard library seems to be pretty important right now.

And yea, you're not going very far without digging into OTP, and Martin Logan's book is pretty excellent. Great entry on this list.

I agree with you so much. I find myself digging into Erlang docs more and more.

That being said, I think there needs to be a communal effort to improve Erlang documentation. It is very terse. One of the points brought up in Garret Smiths talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvKLOecT1I

Agree completely.

For me its all about OTP, thats the difference maker with Elixir/Erlang, without that its just another functional language, with it is an incredibly powerful tool/framework for building impressive distributed fault tolerant systems.

A lot of that is by design. It's my understanding that they made the decision not to wrap erlang standard libraries just for the sake of wrapping them, because the erlang standard libaries work just fine when called from elixir.

If something needed to be wrapped to make it play more nicely with elixir, for example to change argument order to better suit elixir's |> operator, or if there were other real benefits to wrapping an erlang library, then they might wrap it. Otherwise if the erlang library is good just use the erlang library.

Yea, that's what I figured. But I don't like it so much. I tend to end up wrapping it myself just because I like piping with |>.

But my main point was that when I started, I could just look to one source for language docs.

But as I dug in, I realized that to do a lot of things, I needed to look at Erlang too. And then I realized I had to understand it.

It's not bad, it's just a thing that makes learning the awesome language a lot more difficult.

If I may, I feel that there's a better version of the first video. The version you linked suffers from terrible framing where you can't see a single line of code he writes. This video has a much better view, but unfortunately has awful sound. For me though, code is more important than sound quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQwEmdOH-GM

yeah, I found that one, but I couldn't deal with the sound and I felt that the videos were more about getting the general idea of Elixir and understanding some of the things you could do with it in an infotainment way.

I know were you're coming from though, its a really good preso with surprisingly bad recordings.

Erlang in Anger (Frank Herbert): http://www.erlang-in-anger.com

yeah, I'm sure thats a good addition, I've skimmed it and it's on my list to actually read.

*Fred Hebert

Yeah, otherwise it would be http://www.the-erlang-must-flow.com/

Thanks for bringing this up. I've seen and heard it mentioned before and never took the time to seek it out.

Awesome list! I also did two presentations at RedDotRubyConf 2014 and RubyConf 2014 on Elixir:

Rubyists! Have a sip of Elixir – http://www.confreaks.com/videos/5078-RubyConf2014-rubyists-h...

Ruby + Elixir – Polyglot FTW! – http://www.confreaks.com/videos/3845-rdrc2014-ruby-elixir-po...

Also, I'm writing a book on Elixir – http://www.exotpbook.com

Finally, I've done a few posts of Elixir – http://benjamintan.io/blog/tags/elixir/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com