As mentioned earlier, no prior knowledge of Elixir is required to read this book. In the initial chapters, we provide an introduction to Elixir, covering all the necessary concepts to be able to follow the more advanced topics explored later in the book.

To get the most out of this book we recommend that you follow along each chapter, by building and running the application we will develop in this book. To build this application, we have used free and open source software as much as possible. When this was not possible, we have used software with long trial periods, so that you can build and run the application on your own.

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packtpub.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Elixir. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In Elixir, you create a process by calling the Kernel.spawn/1 function".

A block of code is set as follows:

IO.puts("Hello, World!")

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ touch hello_world.ex

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select elixir from the Processes tab."