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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
5 (1)
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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

5 (1)
By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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10
Index

Keywords, maps, and dictionaries

However, we should take a quick moment to introduce more collections. We have covered lists and tuples as either linked lists or contiguous blocks of memory similar to arrays, respectively. However, there is another set of types we haven't covered—associative data structures.

Elixir has a few different kinds of associate, key-value structures, keywords, and maps. Both are a type of dictionary, or hash table, although, they have different underlying implementations and performance characteristics.

Keywords

Keywords are a special name for a list of 2-tuples, or pairs, where the first element of each pair, the key, is an atom. For example, we could see the following list:

iex(1)> alist = [{:a, 0}, {:b, 2}]
[a: 0, b: 2]
iex(2)> alist == [a: 0, b: 2]
true
iex(3)> alist[:a]
0

That is, a list of pairs is the same as a flat list of alternating atoms and values.

There are some very important properties of keywords that make them special and useful...

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