The capture operator works a little bit like capture groups in regular expressions, but for function arguments. Use of this allows for shortcutting and making more readable short anonymous functions.   Helper and anonymous functions Because the use of small helper functions is so ubiquitous in…

Common features As is common in programming, Elixir has two string formats: single-quoted and double-quoted. These two representations have many things in common: UTF-8 character encoding they can contain escape sequences they allow string interpolation they have a heredoc representation Don't let…

Of all the data structures that you might use in Elixir, the one that you will undoubtly use the most is the list. In Elixir a list is a what is commonly referred to in other languages as a linked-list and is used to contain a collection of items of all the same type.   What is a list anyhow? At…

Elixir is a functional programming language, and as such you should expect that it has functions. In fact, like many functional and imperative languages it has two sorts: anonymous and named. Before I go on and discuss functions, I need to cover the concept of arity. The arity of a function is the…

Elixir has many of the types that you would expect from a modern programming language. The following list details these: integers floating-point numbers atoms ranges regular expressions PIDS (process ids) ports tuples lists keyword lists maps binaries structs what may or may not surprise you is…

I thought that I should spend some time looking at the basics of Elixir. I will try very hard not to rehash the material that is already out there, but some crossovers might happen. If you are looking for a more indepth/professional job, I would suggest that you read both Programming Elixir or…

Following on from my previous post: What is this Elixir anyway? you should already have Elixir and Iex installed. In your iex, do the following: There you are, your first Elixir variable. Exciting, isn’t it? At this point, you are fully entitled to ask: ‘Is that it?’ And the answer is kinda yes but…

In the previous posts, we have been using the temporary Erlang Term Storage or ETS to store the data. As this is an in-memory store, any data that is stored is lost whenever the application is stopped. In this post, we will look to change this and make the data persist between application restarts…

I was recently asked to put something together that covered the basics of Elixir but figured that this was already covered pretty well in other places like the Getting Started guide on the Elixir Language website and I didn't want to just regurgitate the content of those texts. There is also the…

In the last of these articles on the link shortener, I am going to discuss static assets. There are two ways of serving static assets - through a webserver like Apache (Apache Webserver) or using Webmachine. We'll add some simple static serving capability to the project. First off add the following…