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

## Introduction to designing Elixir applications

Software that solves real-world problems has to maintain and organize various files. You must learn language features that will help you organize your code and design your application domain. A well-organized codebase makes it easier to fix bugs and add or change features.

In this chapter, we’ll build a game, and learn new techniques to develop and design our own application. We’ll learn how to:
- Design the application entities with Elixir structs
- Create polymorphic functions using Elixir protocols. 
- Create function contracts with Elixir _behaviors_. 

The first step is to learn the basics of **Mix**, the essential tool to start any new Elixir project.

We’ll use a lot of the concepts that we’ve already explored. For example, we'll see higher-order, recursive, and anonymous functions applied together to solve a problem.

> We’ll move faster than in the previous chapters, focusing only on the new things.

**Mix** is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that provides the essentials for building any Elixir application. Mix helps us create and maintain Elixir projects, providing tasks to compile, debug, test, and manage dependencies and our environment. All Elixir libraries and applications were built with Mix. It comes by default with Elixir; we don’t need to install anything new. 

We’ll use the **Mix CLI** tasks to create the initial setup of a small terminal-based game and the Mix module guidelines to build a command-line task to run the game. These are the essential features to build our small project. 

> You can find other useful features in the [Mix official documentation](https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.html).

We’ll begin by making sure we understand the application we’ll build. Then we’ll create the application’s initial files and a command-line task to start the game.

# Introduction to designing Elixir applications

Learn to build a project in Elixir using Mix.

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

Starting Your Project with Mix