Elixir is a functional language that crosses many boundaries. With a syntax borrowing heavily from Ruby, a runtime that is on the Erlang BEAM, a macro system like that in Lisp, and a streaming library like you might find in Haskell, Elixir takes the best features from many environments. Elixir borrows from Erlang's "Let It Crash" philosophy, and adds significant improvements with structs, first-class hygienic macros, and abstractions such as protocols. Many of these ideas were borrowed from other communities, and they make a big difference in language adoption. This book gives you a quick guided tour through the fascinating world of Elixir! Explosive growth in the Internet of Things has created a demand for Elixir’s many frameworks for managing, networking, and measuring hardware. A push for more interactive web systems is driving demand for web programming tools like Elixir’s Phoenix. If you think of a book as a travel guide, this book provides quick day trips that many travelers miss. We’ll focus on several blind spots that beginning and intermediate Elixir developers encounter. We’ll walk you through how to explore types in IEx and when to use Elixir’s primitive data types. We’ll unlock sigils and show you how macros work. Together, we’ll build a mix task.