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About this book

ElixirBook is an attempt to write a beginner friendly book about Elixir and Phoenix, which I write to better memorize things myself, because I heard that writing about something is the best way to learn and memorize something better.

You can find the source code for this book at GitHub: ElixirBook / source

Installation

To install Elixir, follow the installation guide at Elixir's official website.

History of Elixir

In 2010, a very influential rubyist and Rails core team member José Valim started using Erlang for pieces of his Rails apps with higher need for better concurrency. He loved Erlang, but he missed some features, so he decided to create a new programming language which wil run on Erlang VM (BEAM), with all the benefits of Erlang and BEAM but a better syntax and ecosystem.

On Jan 9, 2011 José Valim initialized a new git repository for this language and called it Elixir.

About the language

Elixir is a functional, dynamic language designed for easier scalability and maintainability. It runs on Erlang VM which is refined and battle tested for decades. Scalability, concurrency, fault-tolernace and hot code reloading are some of the strengths of the Erlang VM (BEAM).

Elixir makes creating and scaling web applications a pleasant experience. Elixir and its full-stack framework Phoenix are heaven for Rails, Django, Laravel, Symfony, Play, Spring, Mojolicious and Grails developers, looking for a technology as productive as their previous language/framework but a lot easier to scale vertically and horizontally.

To learn more about Elixir's strengths and features, go to Elixir's homepage.