What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Elixir – Thinking Functionally, introduces Elixir and functional programming, and provides some of the history and justification of Elixir. It also walks you through installing Elixir.

Chapter 2, Elixir Basics – Foundational Steps toward Functional Programming, introduces the basics of Elixir and its types, syntax, and semantics. This chapter lets you start reading and writing Elixir code.

Chapter 3, Modules and Functions – Creating Functional Building Blocks, lets us extend and expand on the previous chapter by introducing the basics of Elixir code organization into modules and functions. It makes us start our lengthy discussion on pattern matching, one of the coolest features of Elixir.

Chapter 4, Collections and Stream Processing, lets us examine collections and explains how to solve common problems using recursive algorithms. This chapter also lets us introduce Elixir's pipe operator and the basis of collection processing.

Chapter 5, Control Flow – Occasionally You Need to Branch, discusses how to do more traditional code branching, conditional statements using Elixir.

Chapter 6, Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency, explains how to write concurrent code using Elixir. It introduces Elixir processes and the basics of message passing.

Chapter 7, OTP – A Poor Name for a Rich Framework, continues the discussion of concurrent programming with Elixir, more specifically in the context of OTP, which is the framework introduced in Erlang for building robust distributed applications.

Chapter 8, Distributed Elixir – Taking Concurrency to the Next Node, examines how to write Elixir that executes on multiple nodes, distributing the processing over possibly many computers.

Chapter 9, Metaprogramming – Doing More with Less, introduces Elixir behaviours, protocols, typespecs, and macros. Using Elixir macros, we examine how we can accomplish more with less code.