Gain insights into Elixir's functional programming fundamentals, explore expressions, modules, conditional statements, recursion, and delve into advanced topics like higher-order functions and application design. Discover Elixir's vibrant community and tooling.

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Elixir is a functional programming language that runs in the Erlang VM, a powerful environment to run distributed systems. This course uses Elixir because of its fun syntax, vibrant community, and production-ready tooling. Elixir syntax lets you focus on what’s important while learning functional programming.

Starting from scratch, you will learn the fundamentals of Elixir including expressions, modules, conditional statements, and recursion. Towards the end of the course, you will focus on more advanced material like higher-order functions, how to handle impure functions, and lastly how to design an application using Elixir and functional programming principles.

By the end, you will be able to write basic Elixir programs that follow the functional programming paradigm.

Learn Functional Programming with Elixir

**Variables** are containers that hold values. Suppose you have a friend who works with office facilities, and they organize the office tools by putting them in boxes. They put a label on boxes to help workers know what’s inside without opening them. Variables are like that; we can’t see what’s inside without checking, but the variable’s name can give us a hint. Let’s create a variable using IEx:

```Elixir
iex> x = 42
#Output -> 42

iex> x
#Output -> 42
```

>IEx shell is present at the end of the lesson to try out the different examples.

We’ve used the `=` operator to assign the name `x` to the value `42`. This action of assigning a name to a value is called **binding**. We can bind new values and results of expressions in variables. Try it:

```Elixir
iex> x = 6 
#Output -> 6

iex> x = 7
#Output -> 7

iex> x = 9 + 1 
#Output -> 10

iex> x
#Output -> 10
```

# Using variables in expressions

The most interesting part of variables is that we can use them in our expressions instead of using the actual values. Here’s an example:

```Elixir
iex> x = 5 
iex> y = 8 
iex> z = x * y 
#Output -> 40
```

Take a look at the expression `z = x * y` and forget the previous steps. We can’t see the values there, but we can guess that the `x` and `y` variables are numbers because we have the `*` operator. Variables encapsulate the values in programs; we don’t need to work directly with values. We can create generic expressions with variables that can use any value to produce different results.

# Naming variables


Getting Started

Introduction to Functional Programming

Working with Variables and Functions

Using Pattern Matching to Control Program Flow

Diving into Recursion

Using Higher-Order Functions

Designing Your Elixir Applications

Handling Impure Functions

Conclusion

Appendices

Binding Values in Variables

Variables