dPhong31415

dPhong31415

Best path & resources to learn Elixir for web dev + AI (from scratch)?

Hi everyone,

I’m starting from scratch with Elixir. My background is in Python and JavaScript, but I want to build a web app in Elixir that connects with generative AI models in the backend.

I noticed some books/courses seem outdated, and I don’t want to spend months going through a bunch of older material if there’s a more practical path today. My goal is to learn the language + Phoenix (or Ash?) well enough to spin up a project quickly, and then later connect it with AI/ML (using Nx/Axon or maybe a Python service).

So my questions are:

  • What’s the most practical learning path for someone starting Elixir now?

  • Which resources (courses, books, tutorials) are still relevant and worth the time in 2025?

  • If you were me, how would you go from zero → first production-ready app (web + AI backend) as fast as possible?

Any recommendations or personal experiences would be super helpful :folded_hands:

Thanks!

Most Liked

plcholder

plcholder

honestly just read the phx docs , it will teach you everything you need to know. I also dont think any elixir book is really outdated, since elixir is like 13 years old most content is fresh and relevant, even the older books will teach you something ofc if its coupled to a framework, you will need to translate the api as you go. A great book I would recommend, once you get up to speed with phx & elixir is data processing in elixir

Not really sure about AI, there are a couple of AI libraries in elixir but out of my depth/interest and I imagine you aren’t running these models yourself? rather calling an api like openai, grok, google? then what i mentioned above should be enough, there is an elixir machine learning book, but i have not read it. The author has made great blogs, so its probably good

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