The Path to Elixir and Phoenix

I gave a talk at Ember London a few weeks ago about Elixir and Phoenix. Lots of people were asking for some materials in how to get started. This would my recommended path:

Watch this talk from José Valim. It will really help you get in to the right mindset but also explain why Elixir exists and what it can be used for:

Next I would suggest reading this book. Parts of it will blow your mind. Especially when you get to spawning processes and having nodes interact with each other. Dave Thomas does an amazing job in writing this book and it is the go to Elixir book:

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

If you prefer to learn through video check out http://learnelixir.tv. It’s almost like a video version of the book and will walk you through the Elixir language.

At this point you could go off and happily create some Elixir applications. If you want to continue you can take a look at the Phoenix web framework. Phoenix uses Plug as its foundation. Creating a small web application with it will help you understand the inner workings of Phoenix. When you’re ready to move in to Phoenix, the documentation is very good and the majority of the modulesare well documented.

Guides / Documentation: http://www.phoenixframework.org/

There is also a Prag Prog book coming out which is in beta at the moment. It’s being written by Chris McCord, Bruce Tate and José Valim. The chapters that are complete so far, give a very good in-depth look in to the various layers of a Phoenix application like database interactions and template rendering.

Programming Phoenix: https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix.