September 2014
Intermediate to advanced
210 pages
5h 9m
English
Content preview from Introducing Elixir
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Chapter 1. Getting Comfortable
The easiest place to start learning Elixir is in Interactive Elixir, iex. This command-line interface is a cozy place to get started and a good place to start figuring out what works and what doesn’t work in Elixir. Its features will spare you headaches later, so settle in!
Installation
Because Elixir runs on top of Erlang, you’ll need to install Erlang on your system first, and then install Elixir.
Installing Erlang
If you’re on Windows, installing Erlang is easy. Download the Windows binary file, run the installer, and you’re set. If you are a brave beginner tackling your first programming language, this is easily your best bet.
On Linux or Mac OS X, you may be able to download the source file and compile it. For me, on Mac OS X, I just had to unzip and untar it, and then, from the directory created by the untarring, run ./configure, make, and sudo make install. However, that simple sequence works only if you have the right files previously installed, and can give you mysterious errors if they weren’t. In particular, Apple’s shift to the LLVM compiler in newer versions of XCode instead of GCC makes it less likely that GCC will be on newer Mac OS X systems, and Erlang needs GCC.
(You can also ignore the error about FOP, which Erlang uses to generate PDF documentation you can download elsewhere. Also, on newer Macs, you’ll get an error at the end that wxWidgets doesn’t work on 64-bit Mac OS X. For now, ignore this.)
If the compilation approach ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.