First Class Functional Programming Books
Written by Kay Ewbank   
Monday, 28 June 2021
Article Index
First Class Functional Programming Books
Clojure & Scala
Lisp, Scheme, Erlang
F#

 

Real World Functional Programming

Author: Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet
Publisher: Manning
Pages: 500
ISBN: 978-1933988924

The subtitle of this book is "with examples in F# and C#", but Mike James says that as neither F# nor C# are strictly functional, this is problematic. F# is more functional than C# but even so there are purists who will discount its credentials. Despite this, he awarded the book 4.5 stars, saying that he got quite a lot of pleasure from reading it.

 

 

If you mostly ignore the C# examples and concentrate on the F# then what you have is an advanced book on using F#, and it includes a good discussion of a range of functional techniques - values, lists, debugging, designing and behaviour-centric programs. The final part provides some good examples of F# and functional approaches in action - asynchronous and data driven programming, parallel functional programs, creating composable functional libraries and reactive functional programming.

Mike concluded that that this would have been a better book if it had simply focused on advanced F# but if you are up to the challenge of reading it then you will get quite a lot from this book. It's for experts only and experts who aren't going to be confused by swapping between F# and C# and a fairly difficult style of presentation. Recommended but with a caution.

Programming F#  

Author: Chris Smith
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pages: 406
ISBN: 978-0596153649

F# is an interesting language and this book does as much as it can to make it so, according to Ian Elliot who gave it four stars, saying that if you are a beginner then this is perhaps not the best place to start. The trouble is that the author understands the material all too well and doesn't seem to have much idea of what a beginner needs to know and in what order. This leads him to explain an idea and then pick an example that is interesting in some other way than just illustrating the new idea.

The book deals with the different ways that F# can be used – functional, imperative and object-oriented. It also covers the practical details of working with .NET. The second part of the book deals with more advanced topics – scripting with F#, asynchronous and parallel programming, reflection and quotations. Ian's conclusion is that the second part of the book is probably more successful in the first in that it is aimed at the advanced user who is more likely to cope with the presentation.

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Beginning Programming All-in-One For Dummies

Author: Wallace Wang
Publisher: For Dummies
Pages: 800
ISBN: 978-1119884408
Print: 1119884403
Kindle: B0B1BLY87B
Audience: Novice programmers
Rating: 3
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

This is a collection of seven shorter books introducing key aspects of programming, but it fails through trying to cover too [ ... ]



T-SQL Fundamentals (Microsoft Press)

Author: Itzik Ben-Gan
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Pages: 608
ISBN: 978-0138102104
Print: 0138102104
Kindle: B0BTLBXF8V
Audience: T-SQL developers
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

Itzik Ben-Gan is a highly respected Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and the earlier editions of this book were already ver [ ... ]


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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 19 January 2022 )