About this book
Elm in Action teaches you how to build applications using the Elm programming language. It starts with an introduction to the language’s basic syntax and semantics, then moves on to building the beginnings of a photo-sharing application. In each of the following chapters, you build on that application—adding features, improving code quality, and writing tests—and learn more about Elm in the process. By the end of the final chapter, you’ll have scratch-built a complete single-page application with routing, tests, client-server communication, and JavaScript interoperation.
This book is written for people who know at least one programming language. This means, for example, that the book does not explain what a function is, or what if does. That said, the book does not expect you to have prior experience with types, functional programming, or any particular language syntax.
You don’t need to be a web programmer to learn Elm through this book. However, because Elm runs in the browser, in many places the book assumes you have some high-level familiarity with web concepts such as browsers, servers, HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you are unfamiliar with these, you may find yourself glossing over a paragraph or diagram here and there, but by the end of the book, you can still expect to understand Elm almost as well as someone who was familiar with those technologies going in.