Elixir Crash Course Lecture Notes

Introduction

• Speaker: Caleb
• Objective: Teach Elixir programming language from the basic level.
• Background: Started using Elixir for a job, and planned the material based on personal study.

Reasons to Use Elixir

• Designed for building scalable and resilient applications.
• Functional programming language with unique approaches.
• Growing popularity, especially in web development with Phoenix framework.
• According to 2023 Stack Overflow survey:
  • Phoenix is the most admired web framework.
  • Many developers prefer Phoenix over popular frameworks like React and Node.js.
• Elixir is one of the top-paying programming languages.
• Elixir = programming language, Phoenix = framework for web applications.

Functional Programming

• Elixir operates with function calls and piping values through functions.
• First steps:
  • Installation and setup using Visual Studio Code.
• Initial example: Basic "Hello World" in Elixir.

Setting Up Elixir Project

• Use mix as the build tool for Elixir.
• Commands:
  • mix new to create a new project.
  • mix compile to compile the project.
  • mix run to run the project.
• Explanation of project structure:
  • lib: Contains main code.
  • test: Contains software tests.
  • mix.exs: Project descriptor and dependencies.

Compiling and Running Code

• Differences between compiled code and interpreted code.
• When to use IO.puts vs. returning values in functions.

Project Setup Insights

• Compilation happens at runtime; changes must be compiled to reflect.
• Functions can be defined to execute when the project is run instead of on specific calls.
• Example of a simple Elixir application structure with features like fault tolerance.

Using Dependencies

• Introduced Hex as Elixir's package management tool.
• Example: Using UUID package to generate unique identifiers.

Basic Elixir Language Concepts

• Data types: integers, floating points, atoms, strings.
• Variable assignment and re-binding principles.
• Explanation of atoms vs. strings and their use cases.
• Conditional logic: if statements and case expressions.
• Example application: Checking membership status.

Working with Lists and Tuples

• Understanding and manipulating lists:
  • Creation and iteration over lists.
  • Appending and prepending elements.
  • List comprehensions for filtering data.
• Explanation of tuples and their usage.

Functions and Higher-Order Functions

• Defining functions in Elixir and using anonymous functions.
• Example of using Enum.map to process data.
• Creating a custom function to calculate sums and averages.

Error Handling

• Using pattern matching with tuples to handle potential parsing errors.
• Example of a guessing game to practice user input and conditional logic.

Final Remarks

• Recap of the main points covered in the lecture.
• Encouraged viewers to check out follow-up content on Elixir Phoenix for web development applications.
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