Do you have any other programming experience?

If so why not read Programming Elixir 1.3 up to the end of chapter 14 (the language bits) then switch to Elixir in Action which will help reinforce what you’ve learnt but also give you a great insight into concurrency and OTP, and then back to the rest of PE when you’ve finished EIA. After that, go on to Programming Phoenix and any other books that interest you.

This is currently my own plan of action - the great thing about mixing things up is you get a different perspective from different authors and I am finding PE and EIA complement each other very well (they cover a lot of the same ground which helps reinforce what you’re learning - saves you having to make notes).

Generally Pragprog is known to keep their books as up-to-date as possible. Programming Elixir has gone from that, to PE 1.2 to the current version of PE 1.3. Programming Phoenix is also in the process of being updated

I’d like to put my vote towards this approach. Some novices will probably ask do I really need both?

There are people who personally prefer either and that’s OK. Dave Thomas’ perspective is important for adopting Elixir in the first place, Saša Jurić’s is important because of his Erlang background.

Programming Elixir is filled with the enthusiasm of somebody who’s “finally seen the way” while being careful to smooth over the sometimes frustrating transition from the imperative/OO world; meanwhile Elixir in Action benefits from the perspective of extensive experience with the Erlang ecosystem, guiding the reader to using Elixir towards optimal benefit.

I found learnelixir.tv to be an excellent companion course to Programming Elixir. I’m halfway through both and both share a similiar content structure, watching the short videos has proven to make the chapter easier to digest to me.

This actually sounds like a great idea. Thanks for the tip!

What is OOP to you? According to Alan Kay (1998) concurrent Elixir/Erlang is true OO, not what C++/Java/C# et al cranked out.

I’m sorry that I long ago coined the term “objects” for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is “messaging” …

That being said there still is a lot of valuable wisdom in the SOLID principles (when “ported” correctly). But there is certainly some disillusionment with regards to the sometimes dogmatic OO that is being practiced in the industry.

Charles Scalfani: Goodbye, Object Oriented Programming - Medium

I don’t follow the Elixir video training since my preferred learning style is books and online tutorials. However, I will say that you may want to focus on your Elixir foundation before diving into Phoenix, especially if this is your first functional language.

I learned Elixir before Phoenix was developed, so I had a good foundation in Elixir by the time I started looking at Phoenix. Coming from Rails, Phoenix was pretty easy to learn after having developed a couple Elixir (non-web) apps.

When I learned Rails, I started with Rails, and picked up Ruby as I want. This worked pretty well for me, since I understood OO. Higher level functional constructs we the most difficult part of Ruby for me back then.

Personally, I feel trying to learn Phoenix, Elixir, and functional programming at the same time will be more difficult than learning Rails and Ruby at the same time if you have some OO experience.

Dave Thomas’s book Programming Elixir 1.3 is an excellent resource after working through the Elixir Guides.