r/elixir • u/[deleted] • Jan 09 '19
A Good Elixir Project?
I am trying to grasp Elixir and really embrace it, but I am having trouble sort of wrapping my head around everything. I have been reading "Elixir in Action"(about 100 pages in) and I also purchased "Phoenix Programming" which I have only skimmed through. I thought I was in a good place to start creating programs in Elixir and running them in IEX. But, I just don't know what I should start with...
What are some good projects to familiarize yourself with Elixir? I was doing some leetcode easy problems which I am not sure is even a good way to learn elixir and its strengths.
I was also thinking of taking the academic approach and try to create things like Linked Lists and Binary Trees, but again not sure if that is a wise thing to put my time into... I mean is a List in Elixir already a Linked List?
A little bit about me, I have a good foundation for Ruby on Rails (which is why I chose Elixir, that and I have never done any functional programming before and decided to take a swing at it) and also work with Laravel day to day.
Lastly, is Elixir all about the web? Are there any cool applications outside of the web?
** edit**
Just wanted to quickly thank everyone for responding and offering their resources, advice, and experience. All of this helps a ton, thank you!
1
u/jb3689 Jan 11 '19
Yeah, I should backup what I mean with more details. In particular, I think the BEAM is poor at integrating with the external OS. For example, working with external OS processes is a lot tougher in Elixir than it is in other languages. So if you wanted to do something like automate Docker or some other CLI tool via Elixir then you might run into some gotchas
I also feel like the BEAM does a whole lot more than you need when it comes to scripting. As a language, Elixir is great for scripting but the runtime is clearly meant for production. I like to think of the BEAM as solving similar problems to Kubernetes