What's the best way to get started with Phoenix 1.7, for someone with no Elixir experience?
Should I learn some Elixir before diving into the Phoenix docs?
Should I learn some Elixir before diving into the Phoenix docs?
If you like learning by watching videos, I cannot recommend this course highly enough, it's what accelerated me from zero to a lot of the key concepts:
https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...
The instructor speaks in a way that's easy to consume, for me. It assumes you already know how to program, and the way he talks about the various topics gives a lot of depth to the various concepts that's missing in a lot of material I've seen -- he explains the "why" of things, not just the "what" and "how".
The course will have you implement a hangman game from a basic client/server model, eventually to a Phoenix non-Liveview page, then to LiveView, so you get a great understanding of how to architect an application the right way and how to make good design decisions.
The whole thing costs just $35, which I think is perfectly reasonable and doesn't break the bank for anyone. The Pragmatic courses are good, but Phoenix is too out of date in them now and it'll cause a lot of pain if you're trying to follow along exactly. Phoenix has evolved quite a bit from 1.5 to 1.6 and now 1.7, and those changes can be a bit confusing to a first time person.
Other place to start would be just the basic docs on the Elixir and then Phoenix site. They're really good. Elixir School is also good (and free).
1. "The Soul of Elixir and Erlang" - https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE ; this fast-paced talk by Sasa Juric will highlight exactly what is special about Elixir/Erlang in terms of fault-tolerance and scalability
2. "Using the Beam to Fight COVID-19" - https://youtu.be/cVQUPvmmaxQ ; this highlights a real-world use of Elixir and the speciality of how the BEAM works using an actor model which I found fascinating. Should get your excited about the possibilities of this language.
3. "The Do's and Don'ts of Error Handling" - https://youtu.be/TTM_b7EJg5E ; this talk by Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, again highlights the shift in thinking about error handling and failure recovery. Not Elixir specific, but since Elixir has it's roots in Erlang it's well worth listening to this talk, which is conceptual and not code-centric.
None of the videos above are Phoenix or LiveView but they should help build some concepts in your brain about why you want to go down this learning path of Elixir and Phoenix, why it's different. I listened to the first two, and I couldn't stop thinking about them, personally.
A last thought I would give you as you're going through any training material or topics, I cannot recommend strongly enough. Consider this pattern: download LiveBook (https://livebook.dev) and create a notebook for each lesson or major topic you're learning. Gives you a great way to learn, take notes, experiment and keep the history rather than just using iex at the command line all the time. I've found this greatly accelerated my active learning, as it's easy to get into the passive learning loophole of just regurgitating the code in tutorials and not stick the concepts into your brain.
Best of luck!
I really liked the approach taken in this book - https://pragprog.com/titles/lhelph/functional-web-developmen...
In which you first build out the functional core in just elixir and then hook up Phoenix as the web interface
Then today I watched half of the video, and was blown away by how clearly he communicates, even when (or especially when?) he's speaking twice as fast as most people delivering presentations.
Lots of free tutorial videos.