Elixir learning curve
- Authors
Updated at 9/15/2023
Hello guys! Maybe some of you know. I started learning Elixir in October 2019, but stopped at the end of 2021. I'm back now with a lot of power! So I want to present my ordered list of what I learned and what worked for me, to help you choose a good learning source and guide you a bit in learning Elixir and friends.
Of course, I'm not an Elixir expert, but I promise to update this article to stay up to date and add new sources as long as I develop my Elixir skills.
Elixir/Erlang crash course
The fastest way to learn Elixir (and also Erlang) syntax? Check out Elixir/Erlang syntax crash course. In all my years, I haven't found a faster way to learn syntax than going through this crash course and trying out a few fitchers in IEX myself.
Documentation
I know a lot of programmers don't like language documentation, but it's a little different with the Elixir language. The documentation is really clearly written and includes a lot of examples (working and actual examples, which is not so obvious with some languages).
So, Elixir Documenation is hightly recomended by my due to: clearness, a lot of working examples. I think that's the best way to learn syntax.
Leetcode
Once you are familiar with Elixir syntax, it is a good time to do some simple exercises. There is a good website that I personally love: Leetcode. With a few simple exercises you can simply learn how recursion, data immutability and so on work. You have examples of exercises there, and of course you can consult your resulting code on the Elixir forum.
Elixir in Action
Excellent book
. Very well written. Elixir in Action covers a little bit of the basics and a lot of intermediate stuff about Elixir such as processes, etc. I highly recommend buying this book and following their exercises.
The book can be purchased here: manning.com
Personal projects
I believe that practice is the best teacher. So I created my own library in Elixir about data structures, mathematics and algorithms. It is also my way of reworking the book Intruduction to Alghorithms written by Cormen. Previously, I wrote implementations of such algorithms in Ruby and JavaScript. So this is a good way to compare languages: FP vs OOP
.
I can't help but wish you the best of luck in learning Elixir!