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Elixir Crash Course

A six-book interactive series on Elixir, the BEAM, OTP, Phoenix, and LiveView — written for experienced JavaScript/TypeScript/Python developers. Each book pairs an interactive HTML guide (theory, quizzes, diagrams) with a runnable Livebook notebook (hands-on code).

JS/TS/Python dev friendly 6 HTML books 6 Livebook notebooks Quizzes & diagrams
1

Elixir Fast-Track & the BEAM

Language speedrun for polyglot devs, then down into the VM: schedulers, lightweight processes, mailboxes, links and monitors.

pattern matchingpipe |>immutabilityspawn/send/receiveschedulers
Read Book 1Livebook notebook
~2–3 hours
2

OTP Core: GenServer & Supervisors

The two workhorses of every Elixir system. Stateful server processes, supervision trees, restart strategies, and the "let it crash" philosophy.

GenServercall vs castSupervisor:one_for_onelet it crash
Read Book 2Livebook notebook
~3 hours
3

Advanced OTP & Application Design

The rest of the toolbox: Tasks, Agents, Registry, DynamicSupervisor, ETS. How Mix applications boot and how releases ship.

TaskRegistryDynamicSupervisorETSApplicationreleases
Read Book 3Livebook notebook
~3 hours
4

Phoenix: The Web Layer

A Phoenix app is just an OTP application. The request lifecycle, plugs, the router, controllers, contexts, and Ecto for data.

PlugEndpoint → RoutercontextsEcto.ChangesetRepo
Read Book 4Livebook notebook
~3–4 hours
5

LiveView: Real-Time UI Without JS

Server-rendered reactive UI. The LiveView lifecycle, assigns and diff-tracking, phx- bindings, function components, streams, and PubSub.

mount/3handle_eventassigns & diffsphx-clickstreamsPubSub
Read Book 5Livebook notebook
~3–4 hours
6

Capstone: Build a Real-Time System

Put it all together: a supervised game engine (pure OTP) with a LiveView front-end, PubSub fan-out, and a path to production releases.

supervision tree designGenServer per gameLiveView UIPubSubmix release
Read Book 6Livebook notebook
~4–6 hours

Setup (once, ~10 minutes)

  1. Install Elixir — easiest via Livebook Desktop, which bundles Elixir + Erlang. Or brew install elixir / see elixir-lang.org/install.
  2. Install Livebook (Desktop app, or mix escript.install hex livebook then livebook server).
  3. In Livebook, click Open → From storage and pick any .livemd file from this folder.
  4. Read each HTML book first (theory), then work through its notebook (practice).

Notebooks use Mix.install/1, so dependencies (Kino, Phoenix Playground, Ecto) download automatically on first run. Books 4–6 start a real web server on localhost from inside the notebook.