The Pragmatic Studio

Getting Started

Let's go! After getting your development environment set up, we generate a new Phoenix app, get settled in, and look at how requests are processed.

Controllers & Views

You can render pages in Phoenix using controllers or LiveViews. And we want you to know how to use both! First up, we render a couple pages using controllers, actions, views, and templates.

LiveView Basics

When building interactive UIs in this course, we'll use LiveViews. They're stateful processes that react to user events over a websocket (at scale!) and update the browser in real-time. We code up our first two LiveViews with stops along the way to understand all the fundamental concepts.

Function Components

Let's write our first function components! They're an easy way to reuse styled markup and make our templates more readable. You'll use function components all over the place, over and over again.

Page Navigation

Page navigation with LiveView is really sweet. It's lightning-fast, in part because it happens over an established websocket connection without a full page reload. And it's simpler to implement as compared to client-side routing in a JS framework.

Ecto Schemas and Queries

In Phoenix, we interact with a database using the powerful Ecto library. To get things started, we learn how to persist and query items using Ecto. We also use streams to efficiently manage a collection of items in the browser without keeping them in the LiveView's state on the server.

Patching a LiveView

LiveViews are stateful processes. That's a game-changer in situations where we want to navigate to the current LiveView process with an updated URL instead of navigating to a new page.

Asynchronous Operations

It's common for a LiveView to need data that we don't want to wait for before rendering the page. Good news: Elixir is excellent at performing asynchronous work, and LiveView builds on that to make it easy to asynchronously fetch data while handling the loading, error, and success states.

Ecto Changesets

How do you keep bad data out of your database? Changesets are Ecto's way of validating data and casting it to the schema types. Knowing how to effectively use changesets is crucial in Phoenix apps, especially when it comes to forms.

Live Actions

Using live actions, a single LiveView can handle multiple URLs and their parameters. We also learn how to efficiently delete a resource from a stream.

JS Commands

Sometimes you need to run common client-side actions, but don't want to eject out of Elixir-land and into JavaScript-land. JS Commands let you add client-side flair without writing custom JS.

Live Scaffolding

We're ready for our second resource! We built the UI for managing the first resource from scratch, so this time we can confidently use the live generator and you'll know exactly how the generated code works.

Ecto One-to-Many Associations

Ecto supports all the different types of associations you'd expect for modeling relationships between database tables. We start with the one-to-many and build out the UI to tie things together.

JSON APIs

Want to build a super fast and scalable JSON API, and do it quickly? Phoenix supports that out-of-the-box, too.

User Accounts & Authentication

With Phoenix, you can generate a full-featured (secure!) authentication system right into your app. After understanding how it works, we use it to authenticate users and restrict access to LiveViews.

Ecto Many-to-Many Associations

From the database tables all the way through to the UI, we build out a many-to-many association so you can confidently use one in your app.

PubSub

You don't have to jump through hoops to update LiveViews in real-time across multiple browsers. All Phoenix apps have a built-in PubSub server. You'll learn how to use it to keep everything seamlessly in sync.

Presence

Want to know who's viewing a page right now? Phoenix has unrivaled, built-in presence tracking that uses PubSub to broadcast presence updates in real-time!

Bonus Content

In addition to the 58 videos, you also get the following tutorials for adding bonus features to the final version of the application:

58 In-Depth Videos

Stream online or download high-quality videos. Includes English subtitles. No rambling or fumbling. Straight to the point and perfectly paced.

Animations

Visual explanations of all the key concepts with rich animations so you get a solid mental model for how everything works.

58 Exercises and Notes

Supplemental footnotes, handy tips and tricks, and 58 guided exercises where you build a second Phoenix app from scratch. All the exercise solutions are included.

Source Code

Full source code for two Phoenix apps, along with before and after versions of the code for each course module. Plus our custom VS Code settings and snippets.

Full Course

• 58 videos (9 hours)
• 58 exercises
• Lifetime access

Best Deal

2-Course Bundle

• Phoenix Course
• Elixir Course
• 94 videos (15 hours)
• 115+ exercises
• Lifetime access

José Valim is the creator of the Elixir programming language, co-creator of Phoenix LiveView, and Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit.

Chris McCord is the creator of the Phoenix web framework, co-creator of Phoenix LiveView, and a programmer at Fly.io.

“By far your courses are the best on the internet. The Phoenix course is easy to follow and you really do respect the student's time, as there is very little fluff. It's to the point and I am never left wondering how everything fits together. You guys are great!” Doug Squarebriggs

“Absolutely amazing. Simply the BEST course to start learning and using Phoenix!” Aaron Zhang

“This course was super easy to follow. Mike and Nicole explain things in a way that just clicks, and the hands-on projects really helped things sink in. I loved how the whole thing came together—from the basics to building full-on apps. They make even the tough stuff feel approachable. It was really practical and gave me a lot more confidence to use Phoenix in real projects. I'm walking away from it feeling inspired, more confident, and genuinely excited to build!” Conrad Taylor

“This Phoenix course and the Elixir/OTP course are probably the best courses I've ever watched! You two have got it figured out. The pacing, info, and everything is great.” Adam Olsen

“This course is by far the best online course I've ever taken! It's truly been a game-changer for me! The way you present the material is incredibly clear and engaging, and it's been a huge help for the internal project I'm working on at my company.” Miłosz Filimowski

“I love all your courses, keep up the great work! What I like most about this course is that you have created a separate Phoenix project to use with the exercises. That definitely forced me to think more, rather than just copy what you had made in the video. All the videos were clear and made perfect sense as to what you was doing and I was getting from the video.” Mike Jones, CTO at Intelligent Editing

“Great teaching approach! You explain all the building blocks one-by-one, so they just make sense.” Wojciech Orzechowski

“The way each feature is introduced and explained is great! And I really like how the app is getting better at each step without being simplistic or too complex. You really found the exact dose of elixir! :-D” Alfonso Ali

“This course is miraculous! It cuts to the heart of topics and makes me feel empowered and truly excited to write my own Phoenix apps. You both are masters of teaching hard topics and making students feel great about the content.” Elliott Whitling

“I am loving the class! The length of the lessons is just right. The content is useful and entertaining to learn. Great style! I really can't say enough about the efficiency of your course!” Todd Fiala

“I've tried working through some other learning material on Ecto and changesets and while I could get the code working, I didn't really understand changesets until your lessons. Your truly one-of-a-kind explanations are clear, short enough to not overwhelm, and deep enough to build foundations. It's wonderful to understand HOW things work, not just copy snippets and hack code together. I'm writing cleaner code and understanding so much more about Phoenix than I imagined before starting the course. You've brought more joy to my Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView coding. <3” Natasha Lemak

“This course has truly been a lifesaver for my knowledge as a developer! I love the way each concept is explained so clearly and concisely, all with such an energetic and joyful attitude. I'm learning so much. My knowledge of Phoenix has grown exponentially thanks to this course, and I'm deeply grateful.” Bonifacio Carrizo

“This is the best course I've taken! I already knew the language, but I still learned a lot of new, handy things, especially about good practices and how to write cleaner, more thoughtful code. The course was clear, well-paced, and straight to the point. It gave me a fresh perspective on how to approach things with Phoenix, and it was exactly what I needed.” Domagoj Korman

“A lot of Phoenix felt like magic so it was great to get a deeper understanding of how things work under the hood. Your courses are always first class!!” Michael Zsigmond

“The content is truly excellent, and the concepts are very well explained. I really appreciate that we're building a different Phoenix application from the one shown in the videos. Thank you for producing such high-quality courses; they really help to understand the foundational concepts described in the documentation while also incorporating best practices, and with a touch of humor as well.” Anthony Guimard

“I really appreciate the way the course is structured and organized, with every detail thoroughly explained. It's been quite easy to make progress. I've taken many online courses, but your teaching methodology is truly incredible. Everything is excellent!” Patrick Espake

“Your course is a must-have!” Franklin Rakotomalala

“The course is well-rounded and covers everything I was hoping for, making it an exceptional learning experience! The course progression is perfect and I appreciate how it takes a complete journey through various approaches to deepen my understanding and solidify concepts. The application developed in the course covers a range of topics essential to building a real-world application, which makes the experience both practical and highly relevant.” Adrián Krywoszyja

“Fantastic course! First off, the audio + video quality is great. It's shocking how rare that is for Elixir content. The lessons are informative and concise. I found the balance between experimenting in IEx and writing project-related code was very helpful. I now have two projects that I can look back on as I'm developing my own SaaS products with Elixir and Phoenix. For Elixir content, Pragmatic Studio courses are an instant purchase for me going forward.” Jesse Brewer

“The course has been fabulous so far! I enjoy coding along with you two, and applying similar concepts to a secondary Phoenix project is brilliant! I can't tell you how excited I am to dive into the next round of videos.” Greg Mundy

“The short videos in each section really enabled me to do little bits at a time, and keep making progress through the entire course. The logical structure and the way each section continued to build upon previous ones was wonderful!” John Hageman

“Super course, thanks so much for making it! I binged it in only a few days. I've been trying to pick up Elixir and Phoenix for a couple years now, but there was always some little thing I got hung up on because I didn't fully grasp how certain things work. This course has really helped clear a lot of that up for me!” Erin Wiggins