Getting Started Guide

In this tutorial we are going to teach you the Elixir foundation, the language syntax, how to define modules, how to manipulate the characteristics of common data structures and more. This chapter will focus on ensuring Elixir is installed and that you can successfully run Elixir’s Interactive Shell, called IEx.

Our requirements are:

• Elixir – Version 1.2.0 onwards
• Erlang – Version 18.0 onwards

Elixir is a functional, concurrent, high-level general-purpose programming language that runs on the BEAM virtual machine, which is also used to implement the Erlang programming language. Elixir builds on top of Erlang and shares the same abstractions for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications. Elixir also provides productive tooling and an extensible design. The latter is supported by compile-time metaprogramming with macros and polymorphism via protocols.