I picked up Metaprogramming Elixir with the intent of reading it at a later time, once I had a bit more exposure and experience with Elixir.

But then I took a little peek at the first chapter and I was hooked.

Chris McCord’s clear writing style and obvious focus on reader ergonomics, e.g., repeating relevant bits of code, makes the book very readable and engaging.

Regarding content, there were plenty of moments when I thought, “Wait, we’re going to do what next?! Okay, I’ve got time to read a few more pages…”

The book introduced me to Elixir’s AST and the concept of macro hygiene, along with repeatable recipes for building DSLs and testing macros.

As an Elixir noob, I don’t think I’ll be writing my own for-real macros just yet, but I feel that I’ve gain a lot of valuable intuition about how the language works.