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by sbarre 2338 days ago
I just started my Elixir journey late last year, and I've been using a combination of Elixir School[0], the Ecto guides[1] and a video course from Pragmatic Studio[2] that I picked up on sale back in December.

The video course was a mixed bag but mostly useful. I am also new to functional programming so it was helpful for getting my head around a new way of planning my code but there were definitely chapters that were painfully basic and slow. So if you're already more advanced, it may not be as useful to you.

That said, they did a good job of introducing certain key Elixir/Erlang concepts by getting you to build functionality "by hand" and then refactoring it into the standard library functionality, so you can understand how it works under the hood, while also learning how to use the built-in library modules in real code.

Elixir has some pretty important concepts around concurrency, state management, and process supervision that are worth exploring in detail before you dive in too deep.

In terms of personal projects, I always try to re-implement an existing project when I tackle a new language. Right now I'm working on a simple scraper/parser that uses a shared worker pool for concurrent post-processing of links scraped by the main thread.

0: https://elixirschool.com/

1: https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/getting-started.html

2: https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/elixir

1 comments

Could you explain a little bit more what you didnt like about the video course. No affiliation but I want to enter this area and I always looking forward to understand what make a course bad/good for a student.
Sure.

Like I said I think overall the video course was well done, and I'm still glad I took it.

Honestly, I think my gripes are mostly subjective, and this will always be the case with one-size-fits-all training.

Certain aspects that are covered by the course were things I was already quite familiar with, so I was itching to skip ahead. There was nothing wrong with the work itself or the instructors. That stuff was very good.

Yes, it makes sense. I think both their framework courses (Rails/Phoenix) are solid but pretty basic. They have a nice production quality so there is definitively a lot of worth in them.