June 2022
Intermediate to advanced
130 pages
2h 45m
English
Content preview from Programmer Passport: Elixir
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Atoms, Pattern Matching, and Erlang Access
We’re going to start with atoms, a data type that might be confusing to Java, C, or C# developers. If you’re a Ruby developer, atoms are like symbols. If you come from Erlang, the data type is the atom.
Exploring a Type in IEx
Open up an IEx console and we’ll get right to work. So, what’s an atom?
| | iex> :atom |
| | :atom |
Atoms are names for concepts. Some good examples are :north, :string, and :yellow. Preface an atom with a colon, followed by a word starting with an alphabetic character.
You’re not limited to atoms with simple characters. By placing double quotes around the text to the right of the colon, you can make more complex atoms like :"blue-green" that would otherwise be invalid. In Elixir, we ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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.