Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6: Functional |> Concurrent |> Pragmatic |> Fun 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

Whoami:I'm a self-taught software engineer with 15+ years of experience, working at a large software corporation in the US. Over the years, I've read tons of programming books, technical notes, language and framework manuals, as well as source code for hundreds of open-source projects. Just to give you an idea that source code and technical book are among the things I professionally know how to work with.Kindle Book Experience (GOOD):My favorite content type is Kindle, my preferred Kindle device is Kindle Voyage. The books uses high quality fonts, hence both main content and source code snippets are very readable and no issues here, job well done.Chapters 1-11 (OK)These chapters of the book were somewhat okay and author deserves a credit for doing his best: content was readable and sort of organized, exercises featuring solutions by the author and even by Jose Valim (kudos for that). Some exercises are designed to connect with the section/chapter you just read, while others are really "off the chart" asking instead "not to use this or that" to complete the exercise. It might be just my learning style is different, but I find these kinds of exercises to turn me away from the subject instead of attracting or immersing into it.In summary, there are a few useful things you can learn from that part of the book but not that much.Chapters 12-13 (MEH)In these chapters, the reader is introduced into "Strings and Binaries" and "Control Flow", while exercises focus on sales tax, printing summary tables with rows and columns, reading from files, parsing CSV and challenging you with this "writing an ok! function, that you would use as ok! File.open("somefile")", while in fact the solution posted by the author features "ok!" function in "MustBe" module. The industry-grade lesson is as valuable as always, do not trust the technical assignment until you clarified every-single-thing. But since the author is off the hook after publishing the book, there is no one to clarify those things with. Good grief…As you can tell from the description above, the content is not in sync with the exercises. Virtually no reference or applicability of the knowledge you were supposed to acquire from these chapters. Though author still applied effort to provide solutions for exercises.Chapters 14-21 (GOOD LUCK)In these chapters, we are introduced into Organizing The Project, Processes, Nodes, OTP Servers, OTP Supervisors and OTP Applications. There is little to almost no effort to explain anything, briefly stated facts that are much better explained in Elixir core manuals (for free, btw). The Duper project definitely solves the issue of finding duplicate files on the author’s laptop but does it serves educational goal to help you learn Elixir? Does the primer improve your knowledge about the subject or intricacies of organizing a project or delivering it successfully? My personal opinion, no it doesn’t.No solutions from the author at all and yes you can find some relevant solutions on Github, posted by readers but the profit of selling the book goes to the author and not to the Github community. So, I don’t take this as a compelling advantage or something to benefit from (in educational sense).Chapters 22+ (DIDN”T READ)Made a conscious choice not to spend my time struggling thru the content that doesn’t accomplish the goal. This part of the book about more delicate and nuanced subjects, such as meta-programming and exception handling. Honestly, my personal opinion - if previous topics weren’t a hit I highly doubt these deep-dive areas would be a success either.And yes, you guessed it right - no solutions by the author for these chapters as well.After re-reading most chapters or sections multiple times, I barely can recall any useful facts or applicable Elixir programming techniques - as a test, I joined Elixir track on https://exercisim.io to see how helpful the book was in building up my Elixir skills and to my surprise, I ended up referring not to the book but to Elixir core documentation to solve even basic challenges.Clearly author has failed to achieve educational goals with the book and maybe it wasn’t the author’s goal after all.My personal takeaway - regret that refund window is closed by now, otherwise I would return this book back for full refund.Hope you would find this review useful when making a purchase decision.

It IS NOT:A replacement for the incredible high-quality Elixir documentation already available on the internet, as the first couple chapters thoughtfully explain. If you just want the documentation and skip this intro, you'll be disappointed & may write a page-long Amazon review bashing the book for not being what it was never meant to be. And if one took an online competency test, it would certainly test on the explicit syntax and idioms that can be objectively measured (and are well described in the docs) and not the subjective ideas, philosophies and decision making skills that make great programmers great. But I digress.It IS:A wide-spectrum but fun overview to the immense landscape of ideas and technologies that make up the Elixir world. Throughout the book, the author highlights common pain points for people transitioning to elixir, especially those coming from more object oriented backgrounds. He offers some useful open-ended exercises and frequently points readers to the documentation for more of the nitty-gritty details. There aren't any answers or guides for the exercises (maybe the broken links used to point there) but that would probably defeat the playful nature of the book. After reading the book you won't know every detail about Elixir, but you will have a great background in what exists and how to fill in the pieces as you need them.

I like the writing style and the way it explains functional programming concepts as well as the exercises which deepen the understanding

Exercises are well introduced in a nice timing of explanation and practice.

Good book

This is definitely good for Elixir tutorial..but it missed some explanation about critical topic...(internal work of erlang process, mailbox concept, lambda function concept, how GenServer works..)But very good for adundant example..all works well.

After 5 years of using Elixir full-time, this is the book I recommend. After even the first half of it, I was ready to jump in and never look back. Also be sure and see Saša Jurić's talk, "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir".

Nice book but the kindle format is bad for reading code, should have downloaded the pdf from the author website

One of the best book for Elixir language.

Un libro que hay que leer si estas entrando en el mundo de elixir, buenas explicaciones, buenos ejemplos, claros. Impecable.

I read the whole book and didn't gain anything for how poorly it is written. If you want to learn Elixir read "Programming Erlang - Software for a concurrent World". You're also better off reading the documentation than this book.