Programming Phoenix Productive |> Reliable |> Fast. It goes through building a website that starts from the beginning and goes up to Phoenix Channels (websockets) for a real-time video streaming application that lets users comment on the video at specific times and it is broadcasted to all other users.
How advanced is this? I'm a beginner Rubyist with some Rails experience and have been interested in trying Phoenix out but I'm not an experienced web dev by any means so the web socket stuff is a bit intimidating.
Does it walk through the basics will enough? Or will I have built something with no idea how it actually works?
Not that advanced. It does walk you through the basics; you should be able to work through it and understand what you've built and how it works (it emphasises and explains the lack of magic). + You should be able to build something pretty easily without ever having touched Elixir before; the book builds up your knowledge very steadily.
I would say maybe, from a language/syntax point of view pair it with "Programming Elixir", which is a good introduction to the language, again going through the concepts of it and building them up well - the Phoenix book goes pretty quickly over the language constructs, just giving you them when needed to understand how Phoenix is doing stuff.
The book assumes a base level of knowledge about programming in general, and some knowledge of how web applications work. However it does cover a lot of the basics - I've got a decade or so of experience in the field and probably skimmed over 75% of the book while it discussed concepts that are familiar to me.