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

A simple script that counts to 10, a homepage that shows recent news, a program that parses each line of a CSV file, what do these programs have in common? They all need to do repetitive tasks to determine the final result. Recursive functions are the core of repetition in functional programming.

In imperative languages, iterative features like `for` and `while` loops are responsible for repetition behavior. Both `for` and `while` loops rely on the mutable state. In functional programming, we have an immutable state, so we need a different approach. Here we use recursive functions.




Get an overview of what will be covered in this chapter and an introduction to recursion.

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

Introduction to Diving into Recursion