Elixir Practice Exercises: Essential Techniques for Mastering the Framework

Elixir is a functional programming language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. It is known for its powerful concurrency model, fault-tolerance, and scalability. If you’re interested in learning Elixir, here’s a short practice you can try:

1. Install Elixir: The first step is to install Elixir on your machine. You can do this by following the installation instructions on the official Elixir website.
2. Write a “Hello, world!” program: Once you have Elixir installed, you can start by writing a simple “Hello, world!” program. Open up your text editor and create a new file called hello.exs. Inside this file, add the following code:

elixirCopy codeIO.puts "Hello, world!"

Save the file and then run it by typing elixir hello.exs in your terminal. You should see the output “Hello, world!”.

3. Play with Elixir’s interactive shell: Elixir comes with an interactive shell called iex, which you can use to experiment with the language. Open up your terminal and type iex to start the shell. Once you’re inside the shell, try some simple commands, like:

elixirCopy codeiex> 1 + 2
3

iex> String.upcase("hello")
"HELLO"

iex> list = [1, 2, 3]
[1, 2, 3]

iex> Enum.map(list, fn x -> x * 2 end)
[2, 4, 6]

4. Learn about processes: Elixir’s concurrency model is based on processes, which are lightweight and isolated units of computation. To learn more about processes, try the following:

elixirCopy codepid = spawn(fn -> IO.puts "Hello from process #{inspect self()}" end)
Hello from process #PID<0.114.0>

send pid, "hello"

This code creates a new process that prints a message, and then sends it a message using the send function. You should see the output “Hello from process …” followed by the message “hello” in the terminal.

5. Try some exercises: Finally, if you’re feeling adventurous, try some Elixir exercises to test your skills. The official Elixir website has a list of exercises you can try, or you can search for other Elixir coding challenges online.

That’s it for this short practice! Elixir is a powerful language with a lot of features to explore, so don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun.