Introducing Elixir

Book excerpt: Smooth, powerful, and small, Elixir is an excellent language for learning functional programming, and with this hands-on introduction, you’ll discover just how powerful Elixir can be. Authors Simon St. Laurent and J. David Eisenberg show you how Elixir combines the robust functional programming of Erlang with an approach that looks more like Ruby, and includes powerful macro features for metaprogramming. Updated to cover Elixir 1.4, the second edition of this practical book helps you write simple Elixir programs by teaching one skill at a time. Once you pick up pattern matching, process-oriented programming, and other concepts, you’ll understand why Elixir makes it easier to build concurrent and resilient programs that scale up and down with ease. Get comfortable with IEx, Elixir’s command line interface Learn Elixir’s basic structures by working with numbers Discover atoms, pattern matching, and guards: the foundations of your program structure Delve into the heart of Elixir processing with recursion, strings, lists, and higher-order functions Create Elixir processes and send messages among them Store and manipulate structured data with Erlang Term Storage and the Mnesia database Build resilient applications with the Open Telecom Platform