Chapter 2. Building blocks
This chapter covers
- Using the interactive shell
- Working with variables
- Organizing your code
- Understanding the type system
- Working with operators
- Understanding the runtime
It’s time to start learning about Elixir. This chapter presents the basic building blocks of the language, such as modules, functions, and the type system. This is going to be a somewhat long, not particularly exciting tour of language features. But the material presented here is important, because it prepares the stage for exploring more interesting, higher-level topics.
Before starting, make sure you’ve installed Elixir version 1.0.x (which also requires that you have Erlang version 17.x). There are multiple ways of installing Elixir, and it’s best to follow the instructions from the official Elixir site.
With that out of the way, let’s start the tour of Elixir. The first thing you should know about is the interactive shell.