Programming Elixir: Functional, Concurrent, Pragmatic, Fun (英語) ペーパーバック – 2014/10/19

Lightning strikes twice. Dave Thomas once introduced us to Ruby with the Programming Ruby book. Now he's found a new programming language that fits the current computing landscape of today as well as Ruby did then. Dave's enthusiasm and humor come through and add to the fun of learning Elixir. It's a great language and this book is a great introduction to it. I recommend the book to all programmers. Even if you never find yourself using Elixir professionally, the concepts -- especially pattern matching and process concurrency, will broaden your sense of possibilities.

As a savvy Ruby developer i know very well what sir Thomas did for the community.
Now Dave is focusing on the Elixir language, and this will shot some light on it: many Ruby folks (me included) will quickly grab his book to enjoy functional programming.
When i started with Ruby there were few books around, so i pick-axed Dave one: i enjoyed it for the first few chapters, then started feeling the pain of academic examples and verbose writing. More recently i jumped to Elixir and get attracted by Dave's book slim format.
From chapters 5 i started being in the same pick-axe mood: is fine to figure out how to implement the map function, but i have hard time figuring out the utility. Even worst uncle Dave forgets he never mentioned some features he innocently puts in the examples: you can check online documentation, but i grab the book to get some extra sugar, not struggling with it.
Do not get me wrong, this is not a bad book, i just really want to like it more... but i don't.

[EDITED]
I gave Dave's book another chance after completing the online docs: i must admit i start enjoying it (one more star).
All of the effort here is oriented in letting you leave object-oriented safe-ground and start exploring functional programming style: in this respect some lack of details are forgivable, and code kata serve the scope well.

[RE-EDITED]
Five months passed since i read Dave's book. My knowledge on the topic has increased, along with my passion for the language.
I slurped the MEAP version of Elixir in Action (a great book). This also reveals that "Programming Elixir" falls short in the OTP ground: i had hard times understanding the Erlang (and Elixir) philosophy. No surprise here, since Dave is not a seasoned Erlang developer. I think this book is good as a primer read (as the online docs are), but lacks the details that force you to keep a copy along (as i do for Elixir in Action and Metaprogramming Elixir).
Said that: thanks to Dave for supporting Elixir, hope more advanced material will come from PP.

Wonderful book. It's well written, includes great examples, and useful assignments. I own several Elixir books, and I consider this book to the most essential writing on the subject. I frequently reference this book when I need to refresh my memory on some bit of syntax or principle.

As someone who really see the need for being able to code on the Erlang virtual machine I had tried and failed to get proficiency in Erlang. Along comes Elixir with promises of a shallower learning-curve and that prompted me to watch Dave's keynote at the first Erlang Conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hDVftaPQwY

His infectious enthusiasm and ability to translate the difficult concept during that talk were enough motivation for me to buy the book.

I have not been disappointed.

Learning YetAnotherImperativeLanguage or YetAnotherOOLanguage is easy, it's just syntax. The challenges I was having were entirely based on how to think. The subtitle of his talk and the very strong theme throughout this book is **how** and **why** to think Different(ly) when it comes to functional programming.

This is the key to the success I'm getting with this book over and above the others in that its focus in on the how and why, and not the syntax. Best book of the year thus far for me.

A bunch of years ago now, Dave introduced me to Ruby. I fell in love with Ruby, probably looked like a big dork to everyone I tried to tell about how awesome it was who didn't know what the hell I was talking about, then Rails came out and suddenly every web startup everywhere was a Ruby on Rails shop (and my work life was good).

Eventually, I started to run into Ruby's warts. Concurrency issues (such as failing to parallelize our 40 minute long test suite despite a massive effort). Insidious mutable-data bugs. Gems which s*** all over the core classes. Overly complexified object-oriented code with a giant mesh of interdependencies.

Elixir came along like a breath of fresh air... Felt like Ruby (in some ways even more Ruby than Ruby... see the "sigils" feature, or macros) but embraced all the functional-language goodness that Matz never quite understood the importance of but which Erlang already provided (except with a far less alien syntax). And Dave is right there, AGAIN, to show the way to us "vanguard" coders who are always on the lookout for the next great tool for the war inside the Matrix. ;)

Clearly, Dave is the Messiah of lovable, interesting programming.

The book is dense (in a good way!) Dave does not waste any time surveying the language- this may not be a book for beginning programmers. His sincere enthusiasm is contagious, however. I find myself referring back to the book a lot!

I can't wait to see what cool things the Elixir community will build with this great new tool, and Dave will in no small way have caused that.