Yes, in practice everything has been so much faster using LV rather than the SPA I was writing at the time… it was a major reason Chris wrote LV in the first place as he talks about in the excellent video at ElixirConf 2018 when he introduced it to the world!

I remember the same week I watched his conference speech I dealt with a very simple requirement to break full_name into first_name and last_name fields… and I realized how many times in my app first_name or firstName was defined from the DB/migration, schema, context, absinthe schema and mutation, apollo, react component tree, tests, etc… so much of it was plumbing data from the backend to the frontend. By keeping the data/schemas/validation logic all server-side it is MUCH faster for me to deal with changes like this without having to touch a dozen files.

This video from the Rails ecosystem also resounded with me… especially when Sam says “Guess what? You’re not Google. You’re not Facebook”. As a solo we don’t have massive teams of specialists… frontend, backend, db, devops, etc. LiveView is such a major win for us optimizing speed to market and lessening complexity!

Hello and welcome,

Learning Rails will teach You a lot about MVC pattern. Those are knowledge You can port them to Phoenix, because it’s similar.

Except for the language, the main difference is Ruby use Object Oriented Programming, Elixir Functional Programming.

It’s like night and day…

Yes fun, like fun in functional.

If You are new to programming, your plan is very suited. Maybe You might learn the latest Phoenix, because it brings new concept to the table, liveview in particular.

There are free introductions

Some free at

and book also, if You prefer to read.

I need the opposite, french to english

Your programming journey is very similar to mine. Html, css, sass, rails, ruby, elixir, phoenix, erlang, javascript, jquery, react, nodejs, react-native etc… many specific tools and languages. For a new programmer language specific tutorials or books are like a trap.
My advice is learn how to design code before everything. Clean Code - Robert Martin is a good book for that.
This is a good article to read.

Years ago as a beginner I also started with Michael Hartl’s excellent Rails Tutorial. After finishing it and finding out about Elixir (which like you I found much more exciting and easier to understand than Rails), I read Programming Elixir followed by Programming Phoenix. I then reimplemented the Rails Tutorial using Phoenix instead. It was pretty straightforward… Ecto vs ActiveRecord was the biggest difference to learn at that point. Nowadays there are very good Ecto books available. I thought that was a great path to get started learning a standard server-side MVC-based webapp with very little JS.

Which Pragmatic Studio course did you do? They have excellent courses on Elixir, Phoenix, LiveView, SPAs with Vue/Elm/React coupled with choice of Phoenix backend (REST, channels, and Absinthe GraphQL). The amount of material and complexity can be staggering!

After exploring all of these I have simplified life (as a resource constrained solo developer) by limiting JS and just doing LiveView (PETAL stack). For this the new Pragmatic Studio LiveView course is outstanding!

Thanks for your replies :).

I think I will go with Programming Elixir and Programming Phoenix and try to recreate the Rails Tutorial app like @tme_317 suggests.

@tme_317 I did the Developing with Elixir/OTP course. I didn’t find it too difficult but stopped when they started talking about testing because I realized I lacked a basic knowledge of things like Git, command line and testing. That’s why I went with the Rails Tutorial courses first. I also want to work as a solo dev so the path you describe sounds like a great fit :).