Elixir in Action

Chapter 2. Building blocks

This chapter covers

• Using the interactive shell
• Working with variables
• Organizing your code
• Understanding the type system
• Working with operators
• Understanding the runtime

It’s time to start learning about Elixir. This chapter presents the basic building blocks of the language, such as modules, functions, and the type system. This is going to be a somewhat long, not particularly exciting tour of language features. But the material presented here is important, because it prepares the stage for exploring more interesting, higher-level topics.

Before starting, make sure you’ve installed Elixir version 1.0.x (which also requires that you have Erlang version 17.x). There are multiple ways of installing Elixir, ...