5 Little Potions

EARLY ACCESS (currently in writing, estimated length: 40 pages)

Hi. I'm Mark and over the past two and a half years, I've been teaching thousands of people my favorite programming language, Elixir, through video screencasts.

This project is a bit different. 5 Little Potions is a mini-ebook aimed at people new to Elixir programming or people who just want to have some fun making games with it!

Elixir is a descendant of Erlang, a programming language renowned for its exceptionally well-designed concurrency model, functional expressiveness, and rock-solid stability.

But while Elixir maintains Erlang's concurrency model and runs on the same solid VM, it was designed with the goal of combining the joy and beginner-friendliness of Ruby with the power and scalability of Erlang.

In 5 Little Potions, you'll learn to begin your journey into Elixir programming by creating increasingly complex games. You'll start with the very same number guessing game that was Lesson 1 on the popular Alchemist Camp YouTube tutorial series.

Next you'll start working with Elixir Structs in a simple board game, before moving on to explore Phoenix LiveView, simple web graphics and a sudden death game—Flappy Phoenix.

After that brief exploration, you'll return to a more complex text adventure game and a final, more complex game (TBA).

In 5 Little Potions, you'll:

– Learn how to work with immutable data in a functional paradigm

– Break problems down, using Structs and Pattern Matching

- Use mix to pull in 3rd-party modules

– Create a simple graphical web game using Phoenix LiveView

– Explore advanced language features

This isn't a comprehensive guide. It's a playful exploration through a wide swathe of Elixir to ignite your curiosity to continue exploring on your own!