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Comment by hoov | Hacker News Reader

> I am just starting out in web development and am looking for any tutorials on Phoenix/Elixir/Erlang.

While I like Elixir a lot, I'm not sure that it's the best place to start. I'd find an ecosystem that is more stable and has more reliable resources available. Try starting with Rails or Django, maybe.

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So its just that the ecosystem that is weaker compared to Rails? When would be a good point to learn Phoenix after having say gone down the road learning Rails.

I don't actually agree that the ecosystem is weaker than Rails. There may be fewer hex packages than Ruby gems, but after 10 years worth of doing my own Rails work and cleaning up other people's messes, I can safely say that most of the gems in the ecosystem are antithetical to well-designed modular software.

Bottom line, learning to write software well is hard, no matter what language you're in. What is probably weaker in the Elixir sphere is the amount of blog posts that go deeper than "Yay elixir", but there are some really high-quality books that are a good subsitute. Here's the order I usually recommend for new Elixirians:

1) Dave Thomas' Programming Elixir 2) Sasa Juric (http://theerlangelist.com/) Elixir in Action (blog is also great) 3) Programming Phoenix (Jose Valim, Chris McCord, Bruce Tate) 4) Lance Halvorsen's Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix should probably be in there somewhere but I'm not sure where, as I haven't had a chance to read it yet. 5) Designing for Scalability with Erlang and OTP is a good followup when you're comfortable with the syntax and concepts from OTP

[1] https://pragprog.com/book/elixir13/programming-elixir-1-3

[2] https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action?a_aid=sjuric

[3] https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix/programming-phoenix

[4] https://pragprog.com/book/lhelph/functional-web-development-...

[5] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024149.do

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