Chris Smith's book “F # Programming”

Any development methodology, tool, technology or programming language attracts attention for various reasons. It can be something innovative, and then after ten or two years (!), The hands of the rest of the computer community will reach it. So it was with almost all the ideas that had to go a long way from geek conferences to recognition by the general public. Another way to break into the "mainstream" is to support an already well-known vendor, for example, such as a company ... Microsoft. Most people are inertial and will not put their energy into the “non-name” tools until they make sure that their investment will be in demand. If such a vendor deals with the tool, then the risk of learning something that is not useful in the future is very small.


In fact, such an opinion is very short-sighted, because when you learn a new tool, language or technology, you develop, learn something new, and including the ability to apply these approaches in a different context. This is especially true when it comes to new programming paradigms, such as functional programming, which in itself is not tied to a particular language or technology.

Speaking of Chris Smith's book “Programming in F #” ( Chris Smith “Programming F #”), then it can distinguish several components. Firstly, it talks about functional “features”, such as functions of the first kind, immutability, aka pattern matching, discriminated unions, deferred calculations, function currying, memoization, etc. Secondly, these are some of the features specific to the F # language, such as computational expressions, list comprehensions and sequence comprehensions, async workflows, etc. The third component is the topic of multi-paradigm programming in F # language, in which the author considers mutability, imperative and object-oriented programming. This topic is closely related to interlanguage interaction,

It seems to me that the book will be most useful to readers already familiar with object-oriented programming and programming on the .Net platform, since it is these topics in the book that are very poorly disclosed (and inaccuracies in object terminology are simply annoying). But this is not a serious problem, since there are a lot of books devoted to the .Net platform and the C # language and trying to surpass Richter or Skeet and squeeze into several chapters what other authors dedicate to the book is not very realistic. But on the other hand, the “functional side” is described rather well and the information will be quite enough for the reader to begin to apply the acquired knowledge in practice. And since many modern developers just do have knowledge of OOP and the C # language and look towards functional programming, this book will be exactly that

Z.Y. Yes, by the way, this book should appear in Russian very soon. I do not know the exact release date, but since I finished editing it a couple of weeks ago, then, in any case, we are talking about weeks, not months.

via Programming Stuff .