Elixir Fundamentals

Elixir's combination of modern language features, and a 30-year-old battle-tested foundation at its core, has made it increasingly popular over the past year

Elixir Fundamentals

Working With Data Structures

Earlier we outlined and worked with several different types of data structures. Let's take a closer look at some of these methods.

  • Working With Data StructuresEnum & Map

    We've learned about how to create and work with list and map literals in very basic ways. Let's take a look into some of the tooling that Elixir provides as core language features, for working with these data structures.

  • Working With Data StructuresEXERCISE: Map, Filter, Reduce

    We have a program that starts with a list of objects read from a file. Using the built-in functions available in the Enum and Map modules, filter out "inactive" items (objects where the "active" attribute is not true), and then log a list of object names to the console.

  • Working With Data StructuresTaming List Enumeration with Comprehensions

    Often we find ourselves looping over something enumerable; mapping values into another list; and potentially filtering out some unwanted items. Comprehensions use a generator and a filter to provide some excellent syntactic sugar for this kind of task.

  • Working With Data StructuresEXERCISE: Comprehensions

    Take another pass at the previous exercise, and use a comprehension to devise a concise solution.

  • Working With Data StructuresLazy Operations with Streams

    Elixir's Stream module offers some of the same capabilities that we enjoy in the Enum module, but when working with Streams, computations are performed lazily. This is particularly useful for dealing with huge (or infinitely huge) collections.

  • Working With Data StructuresEXERCISE: Skimming a good book

    Given the entire text of the book ~Gulliver's Travels~, find the highest- Scrabble-scoring word within the first 1000 lines.

  • Working With Data StructuresRecap & Wrap Up

    We'll round out the course by recapping everything we've learned, and finish with some tips for next steps in your mission to become an ace Elixir developer!


Solid Foundation

Learning a programming language in "as-needed" chunks can leave holes in critical areas of knowledge. In this course, there's no worry of "not knowing what you don't know".

The Functional Way

Many developers come to Elixir from a less functionally-oriented language like Ruby or JavaScript. We'll help you adjust the way you think, so you'll start forming good habits from day one!

Ecosystem Aligned

You'll learn how to align your code with Elixir and Erlang language-specific idioms, opinions and conventions. Why learn things the hard way on your own?