My Elixir Education in a Series of Books

I have been collecting a small library of Elixir books.
This is an introduction to the breadth of the topics covered by Elixir.

A lot of these are tutorial style books that need to be worked through to get the benefits.

My first introduction to Elixir was:

This is Seven More Languages In 7 Weeks which covers a range of languages.
This gave a quick overview of a lot of the language.

Next up was the general introduction book:

Introducing Elixir

This is Introducing Elixir (there is a second version) a fairly straight conversion of Introducing Elixir. This is a gentle introduction to the language.

Next was an earlier version of:

Programming Elixir

This is Programming Elixir (I read one of the earlier editions). This is an in-depth exploration of the language.

Next was

Designing for scalability with Erlang/OTP

This is Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP. This goes into more depth on the OTP and how to design for scale. It took me several attempts to work through this.

Next was:

Programming Phoenix

This is Programming Phoenix. I have so far made three attempts to work through this one, the first was in the beta, the second when it was finished (I got distracted) and again recently.

This is one that I am still trying to find the time to read:

Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe

Each time this one makes it to the top of the list I keep finding another book to read ahead of it.

Metaprogramming Elixir

This is Metaprogramming Elixir which gives a deeper understanding of when to use macros (and when not to).

I won a copy of this on a twitter competition:

Phoenix for Rails Developers

This is Phoenix for Rails Developers another more gentle introduction to Phoenix. The contrast with Rails is illustrating, pointing out pain points that Phoenix solves.

The next book is less about the code and more about how to get a project to use Elixir:

Adopting Elixir

This is Adopting Elixir. This covers some case studies of Elixir being used in production environments.

This is another book that explains how to design with Elixir

Functional Web Development, with Elixir, OTP and Phoenix

This is Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP and Phoenix.

The next one would make a great second book for Elixir:

Designing Elixir Systems with OTP

This is Designing Elixir Systems with OTP. The approach of building Fun Things, with Big, Loud Worker Bees is a great project structuring approach. It explains the layers that should be used to design a great application.

This is another that I have not yet finished reading, but do get a lot out of:

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

This is Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! It’s a huge book and covers a lot of details about working with Erlang. I have been meaning to create a repo converting the examples in this book into Elixir.

By the same author is:

Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir

This is Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang and Elixir. The book is more biased towards Erlang. However the ideas in it have changed how I unit test things.

Another one of the books that I have not yet finished (I did buy it in beta):

Real-Time Phoenix

This is Real-Time Phoenix. It covers the soft real-time features of Phoenix.

Another one that I recently finished reading:

Genetic Algorithms in Elixir

This is Genetic Algorithms in Elixir. This covers a topic that you would not naturally associate with Elixir. It makes a good case of why Elixir is very good at it (parallel execution can speed these up).

This is another one that I started working through in beta, and have not yet returned to:

Testing Elixir

This is Testing Elixir. It goes into depth about how to get the most out of ExUnit.

This covers one of the tools that is used heavily by Phoenix.

Programming Ecto

This is Programming Ecto. It covers the database interaction code in more detail than the other books. I like that Ecto provides both Migrations and the data access abstractions.

This is my most recent purchase:

Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir

This is Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir. It seems to cover the tools needed for large scale data processing. Not yet started on this one.

The last one in this list is also as yet unread.

Modern CSS with Tailwind

This is Modern CSS with Tailwind. Technically it is not an Elixir book, but does form part of the PETAL stack (Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine, Liveview). I do plan to create an unofficial repo with the examples for this in Phoenix.

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