Elixir 101: Essential Functional Programming Techniques

Course details

Elixir is a highly scalable, performant, fault-tolerant functional programming language with an incredible adoption rate in a wide array of companies. In this course, experienced software engineer Vanessa Lee introduces you to the benefits of Elixir and walks you through the functional programming basics essential for writing Elixir code. She covers the basics of data types, variables, and functions, then uses practical challenges and exercises to teach topics specific to functional programming, such as immutability, recursion, the actor model, and pattern matching. After completing this course, you will understand how to write applications in Elixir and where to go for more in-depth learning.

Concepts

Introduction

Welcome to Learning Elixir
What you need to know
Using the exercise files

Functional Programming and Elixir

Installation
Functional programming overview
Getting started

Mix

Brief introduction to Mix, the Elixir build tool
Meet Elixir Data Types

The usual suspects

The collections
Act on Data
Logical operators
Exercise - Use operators with strings
Mathematical and comparison operators
Exercise - Use operators with integers

Bind variables

Challenge - Create a simple multiplier
Power of Pattern Matching
The match operator

The pin operator

Exercise - Use pattern matching
Managing Data Collections
Lists

Maps

Challenge - Create a list of maps
Iterating in Elixir
Iterating

Advanced iterating

Challenge - Iterating
If Not Loops, Then What
Control flow structures - if and unless
Exercise - Use if and unless

Control flow structures - cond, case, and with

Challenge - Control flow
You Can t Be Functional without Functions
Functions

Modules and advanced functions

Challenge - Modules and functions
Tackling Recursion

Recursion basics

Advanced recursion

Conclusion

Wrap-up and next steps