tony612 / the-zen-of-elixir

Collection of top articles reflecting the Zen of Elixir

The Zen of Elixir

Mastering Elixir is not easy. This project tries to collect the most inspiring resources about Elixir. It's not about teaching the basics, it's about the most important things that every Elixir programmer should know.

There're articles, talks etc.. covering various topics, but they can be hard to find as Elixir beginners. That's why this project is created. These resources are useful and inspiring even if you don't program in Elixir (yet).

(Check out awesome-elixir for a list of books, tools, forums etc.. for Elixir)

BEAM

• The Zen of Erlang （中文翻译）

It's important to understand Erlang - not the syntax - if you want to be a master of Elixir. Learn to think in the BEAM way by reading Fred's great article.

• Tail Call Optimization in Elixir & Erlang – not as efficient and important as you probably think

Every book about FP have a section on tail recursion, but should we really always program in this style? More importantly, when in doubt, benchmark it!

• To spawn, or not to spawn?

Everyone is excited about "Erlang Process", but should you use them at all times? Do separate modules always need to associate with separate processes? This inspiring article from Saša Jurić shows the differences between functions/modules and processes and how you should leverage them for different concerns.

Interestingly, not long after this, in José's keynote at ElixirConf.EU 2017 he also talked about modules and processes (and data) being different parts which compose Elixir together.

Elixir

• Beyond Functional Programming with Elixir and Erlang

Erlang and Elixir are considered as functional languages. However, it's not a goal. So what is the goal of Elixir? And how FP contributes to it? Read this to find out.

• Comparing Elixir and Erlang variables

It can be confusing to understand rebinding of immutable variables in Elixir. Let José explain this for you :)

• Elixir in times of microservices

Elixir excels at scalability and maintainability, but how to achieve this? You should consider umbrella projects first for your great projects.

• Mocks and explicit contracts

Elixir is dynamically typed, so tests are important. It's functional, so it's very different to write tests. Forget what you know and learn from this great post.

• Elixir and IO Lists Part 1, Part 2, Talk

Be it rendering HTTP response, querying a database or even writing to a file, what you actually operate on are bytes. All your messages passed around in distributed Erlang clusters are bytes too. How can we send bytes more efficiently? Do we really need to build the entire response or query as one whole thing before sending it? Check out this excellent series to learn the "secrets" of sending bytes.

Phoenix

We believe Elixir should not be limited to Phoenix, but still keep this section considering its popularity.

• Phoenix Is Not Your Application and the discussion on elixirforum

Phoenix is just an application like other applications. So learn to think of Phoenix in this way from this talk.

Contributing

Please provide a link and a summary describing why it's important knowledge for Elixir programmers.