Introduction

This tutorial will show you how to get started in Elixir. I assume that you are familiar with Ruby, or Python. Even though a basic knowledge of Python or Ruby is not a requirement, knowing a little can help because the syntax in Elixir and these 2 scrpiting laguages share some similarities. I’ll try my best to reference any material that can help make your learning Elixir journey a bit manageable as we go through the tutorials.

We’ll start with why on earth anyone would want to learn Elixir. What is it? And why bother?. Haven’t we learned enough programming languages already? Hmmmmmmmmmm well, To be at the forefront of our ever-changing world with new technologies popping up all the time, it may be necessary for us to keep updating our knowledge of the world.

What then is Elixir? “Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications” - https://elixir-lang.org/ We will talk about functional programming as we progress through these tutorials. Why should someone consider learning Elixir? Because anyone planning on building a distributed, highly scalable, robust and fault-tolerant system should try Elixir. It is an amazing functional language with a ton of benefits. Compared to Ruby or Python, Elixir offers better performance because it is compiled language.

We will be using Elixir’s IEX (Interactive Elixir for short) A REPL that will help improve our learning experience. A REPL which stands for Read-Eval-Print-Loop is an interactive, typically console-based interactive programming environment

Please head over to http://elixir-lang.github.io/install.html to see how to install Elixir on your system