Metaprogramming Elixir

Metaprogramming Elixir
pragprog.com

Roughly in the order I'd recommend consuming them.

Dave Thomas - Power of Erlang, Joy of Ruby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lww1aZ-ldz0

Dave Thomas Elixirconf Keynote - Think Different- http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening-...

elixir-lang.org tutorial - http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html

Programming Elixir - https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

Awesome Elixir - Curated list of great libraries - https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Elixir In Action - http://www.manning.com/juric/

Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good - http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

Erlang and OTP In Action - http://www.manning.com/logan/

I haven't had a chance to read McCords new book, but having read his code and interacted with him a fair bit in #elixir-lang the last few months I can only assume I'll be adding it to the bottom of this list as an important intermediary step to becoming proficient in Elixir along with learning OTP.

However, if you are going to use (and abuse) this powerful feature of Elixir, I can't think of anyone better than Chris McCord to help guide you on your way. Chris' talk on Macros[0] at Erlang Factory last year was not only highly education, but also very entertaining. If that video doesn't convince you, I recommend you take a look at the Phoenix web framework codebase[1]. Chris is an incredibly talented programmer, and an incredibly helpful, and patient guide to those less skilled than he attempting to contribute code to his projects (I know this because he held my hand through getting a pull request merged into Phoenix some months ago when I was still playing with Elixir).

[0] http://vimeo.com/88885763

[1] http://phoenixframework.org

For me, metaprogramming is one of the things that was a deciding factor with Elixir, in addition to all the other functional programming aspects that are part of the language. I'm most definitely not an amazing polyglot with a wide degree of experience with every single functional language out there, but this feature pushed me to invest time to learn Elixir. Metaprogramming has saved me immense time in numerous applications in Ruby. So, I consider it a critical thing to learn.

Of course, after investing time in Elixir you very quickly learn the power of the Erlang VM. Elixir is like a gateway drug! I now have a consistent mix of Erlang and Elixir syntax in the stuff I'm playing around with. One of the chief complaints for people with Erlang is the syntax. Elixir makes the entire proposition of learning Erlang far more appealing...and then you really it is all actually Erlang under the hood!

And, one of the big things that Elixir adds on top of the Erlang VM is metaprogramming. There aren't a lot of great sources out there on the subject. Chris's book is a great addition to the slowly growing Elixir library.

For me its all about OTP, thats the difference maker with Elixir/Erlang, without that its just another functional language, with it is an incredibly powerful tool/framework for building impressive distributed fault tolerant systems.