Excited to announce that I have launched the full release of Phoenix Inside Out series.

complete-edition-books.png1024×347 221 KB

Currently it contains 3 books and 1 booklet. Read more here.

As an update to my Phoenix Inside Out book, I am happy to announce that a demo site is now available at http://mango.shankardevy.com

This is exactly the same commerce site that you will learn to build when you read my book Phoenix Inside Out apart from learning to build a mini-Phoenix framework and learning Practical Ecto.

Looking forward to your comments!

I’m an early buyer of Shankar’s books. First of all, he made me understand what “context” is all about. Garuda was a real surprise and quite enlightening. Ecto, clarifies a lot of things. And Phoenix book has every little detail about developing an ecommerce site. I bought the “Coach Edition” and get excellent support from him. Highly recommended, 5 stars.

I picked up the Complete Edition a little more than a week ago and have been trying do read a little bit every day. I have read 7 chapters of the first book so far (Mastering Phoenix Framework) and the learning process has been great.

Here are some highlights:

• Great Elixir chapter. The decision to include a chapter on Elixir was one of the biggest selling points for me. I have read plenty recommendations to understand Elixir before Phoenix. But all of Elixir is a lot… Shankar did a great job of creating a condensed walkthrough of Elixir before diving into Phoenix. I’m super thankful for this.

• Bite-sized progress. Adopting TDD (Test driven development) and XP (extreme programming) philosophies, each new topic is presented in a scope that is fun and digestable. Throughout the book, you gradually gather a listing of building blocks that help you construct a solid foundation in understanding Phoenix.

• Rinse and repeat. From chapter 4 onwards, each chapter has a focused topic and goal. On a macro level however, most chapters guide you through the same cycle. From the acceptance test to the router to the template… and teaching topics like Context, Plug, and Ecto along the way. You really start to get a good grasp of the Phoenix architecture pretty fast.

and some constructive feedback:

I have noticed some typos here and there. The ones found inside code examples stumbled me a few times. There has also been discrepencies between the code examples in the book and the ones in the linked gists. It may help looking into using scripts to generate the code examples to help ensure their correctness.

Depite the typos, I would still highly recommend the books. I have actually already reported the typos that I have encountered to Shankar, who has been nothing but kind and appreciative in his replies.

I was actually hoping to work through the entire first book and write a full review on it. Due to time constraints however, I need to prioitize things a bit in the near future. Selfishly, I actually want to take what I have learnt so far and start using Phoenix to work on a hobby project. In the mean time I have taken a quick glance through the rest of the book and series and I definitely would want to use it as a developer reference in the future. I also need to cheat a bit and skip forward to read the chapter on Channel communications soon…

It is nice to see more books coming out.

Would you be able to tell us what differentiates your book from the official Phoenix book?