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

We’ve reached the end of the course. We’ve discussed the advantages and disadvantages of four strategies to handle uncertain values in functions. With this knowledge, we can promote changes in our codebase to achieve a low maintenance cost. 

Let’s review what we've learned in this chapter:

- Impure functions can result in unexpected values because they *depend* on values that are not in the function’s scope.
-  The `case`, `if`, and other control-flow statements are suitable for handling simple cases. Combining multiple conditional statements produces code that’s hard to understand; hence we avoid it.
- The `try` statement works with libraries where we don’t control the code. These libraries can raise errors or throw values. Functions that return values are simpler and easier to handle than functions that raise errors or throw values. Thus, we should avoid creating functions that use `raise` and `throw`.
- We don’t need to learn all the theory behind monads, nor have a mathematics degree, to start using simple monads like `Error`. It helps generate simple code and is easy to use. However, it’s not part of the Elixir built-in ecosystem; searching for a library that fits our team’s needs can be challenging.
- The `with` statement is very flexible for handling uncertain values thanks to pattern matching. It’s the pragmatic strategy for most cases.

Get an overview of what is covered in this chapter.

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

Chapter Overview