Part 1. Getting started

Phoenix is a web framework that’s built on top of the Elixir programming language. It describes itself in three words:

• Productive
• Reliable
• Fast

Although those words certainly describe Phoenix, there’s so much more to be excited about.

In chapter 1 of Phoenix in Action, you’ll be introduced to Phoenix at a broad level—what it is and what it’s good (and not so good) at doing. In case you don’t know Elixir, the language that Phoenix is built on, you’ll be introduced to this amazing functional language in chapter 2. In chapter 3, we’ll take a closer look at how Phoenix is organized by tracing a web request from the user’s browser all the way to the response provided by Phoenix.