Elm: Getting Started

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Michael Van Sickle, and welcome to my course, Elm: Getting Started. For a front-end web development technology to be taken seriously, it must offer something truly unique that makes it stand out in a saturated field. Applications written in the Elm language are lightning fast and almost immune to runtime exceptions, making it an attractive option for developers whose customers are increasingly sensitive to performance and quality. In this course, you're going to learn everything you need to get started building applications with Elm. Some of the major topics that we'll cover include how Elm gives you all of the power and reliability of a functional language, even if you don't know what a monad is, what the standard components of an Elm application are and what their roles are, how to set up a local development environment, and what each of Elm's four core tools are and how to use them. By the end of this course, you'll know everything you need to build your own Elm applications. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with the basics of web programming, including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn Elm, with the Elm: Getting Started course, at Pluralsight.

Core Language Concepts
Hello and welcome back to the course. In the last module, we went through an introduction to Elm and got our first taste of Elm code. In this module, we're going to dig deeper into that and start learning the core language concepts that you're going to need to understand to work with Elm. Now I want to focus on that word core. We're not going to go through an exhaustive study of every programming structure that's available in Elm right now. Instead, what I'm going to try and do is lay a foundation of the things that are really critical to understand in order to work with Elm, and then as we need additional concepts, we'll add those in at the point that we actually need those so that you understand why it's there and what it's doing for us. So perhaps one of the most foundational things that we're going to need to understand to work with Elm is how to work with primitive values. So we're going to go through that first. So this is going to constitute the language primitives that are built in Elm and how we can work with those. From there, we're going to dive into functions. Now obviously, since Elm is a functional language, functions are going to be everywhere in our Elm applications. So we're going to cover that next so that we can understand how to work with functions that are built into Elm and how to create our own. From there, we're going to go into if expressions. So many of our applications are going to require branching logic, and, just like in a lot of other languages, Elm uses if expressions in order to demonstrate that you might have one or more possible code paths to go down. And finally, we'll wrap up this module by talking about some of the common data structures that are going to exist in your Elm applications. And that's all you're going to need to understand about the Elm language itself in order to start being productive in Elm. So let's go ahead and get started by learning how to work with primitive values in Elm.

Creating Projects with Elm
Hello, and welcome to the final module of this course. So far, we've learned how to work with the Elm language and how to use that language to build some applications. However, we've got one fairly glaring oversight that we need to address in this module, and that is, how do you work locally with Elm? As you'll recall, all of the examples that we've done so far have been done using Elm's online editor. And while that's great as a teaching tool, it doesn't do you very much good when you need to get code into production. So we're going to show you how to install Elm locally and work with that. So the first step in the process is going to be the actual installation process with Elm, and you'll find that that's actually remarkably easy, so we'll go through that quickly just so that we're on the same page and able to start working with the Elm tools. Then I want to show you an example of configuring an editor. There's actually quite a few editors out there right now that have plugins that work with Elm, but I just want to show you one as an example of what you might expect. Then we're going to go through a survey of the Elm tools. There are four tools that come prepackaged with Elm, and I want to show you how to use each one of those. Along the way, we're actually going to build our first local Elm application, based on one of the examples that's hosted on the Elm website. And finally, there are some tricks to working with the Elm language that might not be intuitive at first, and the most critical that you're going to run into very quickly is how to work with CSS. But because of the way Elm is structured, HTML and JavaScript work together very well with it. You're creating the HTML using the virtual DOM, and you're creating the JavaScript will all of the functions that you're building in your Elm application. However, CSS doesn't naturally fit into the Elm environment the way that we've seen it, so I want to show you a couple of tips at the end of this module to show you how to work with CSS during development time and the differences that you're going to have to consider when you want to release your application to production. So let's go ahead and get started by learning how to install Elm on our machines.