(Sorry if this sounds like a commercial, but I liked the book)...
Can a 650+ page book from 2007 on an evolving language be any good? There are only two or three other F# books available, so saying it's the best reference isn't a big commitment. But two years after its release, Expert F# continues to be a great reference and overview of the language. It has a number of good things going for it.
- The book's not a 650 page reference manual. Expert F# is really two books in one. The first 250 pages deals solely with the language, functional and OO programming techniques, and available libraries. Seemingly in its entirety. I find F# an incredibly clean, simple, and easy language to program in (at least from my reference points). The fact that it can be fully described in 250 pages speaks to its straight-forward nature and lack of weird edge cases. Compare that to your JVM/CLR language du jour.
- The Appendix is a 7 page language guide to the F# syntax and language features. I printed this out from the eBook copy early on and it never left my side. This was a great aide in learning the language and all programming books should steal the idea.
- The functional programming chapter clearly explains the idioms of FP and does not use OO as a point of reference. I don't want an OO/FP hybrid and this is a good introduction to recursion, immutable data types, pattern matching, et al, yet it strictly avoids the common "here is how to use a functional syntax with the standard Java/C# mutable HashMap". In fact, I suggest you skip the OO chapter. Let's learn FP first, and then decide when it's required to resort to OO.
- The eBook has a searchable index. The book is 2 years old and it's still easiest for me to find answers in the pdf rather than searching Google and HubFS.
- The downloadable code samples are a valuable resource for exploring the concepts beyond code snippets. I have fond memories of using the PalmOS code samples to learn the platform, and these are of the same caliber. But seriously, isn't there a better build system for .NET than build.bat files? Ugh.
- An entire chapter on fslex and fsyacc? Actually, there are two chapters. Awesome, especially when coupled with the code samples. Langauge oriented programming gets a very good treatment here.
- The asynchronous workflow and concurrency chapter is worth reading just to see how elegant they made thread manipulation and wait/join actions. Yes there is a difference between let and let!, and it's cool. And who doesn't want yet another monad tutorial? Not me.
This is really two books in one: a language guide and a set of case studies on advanced topics. I'd have bought this book long ago if it were just the first 250 pages. Can anyone read a book that's too heavy to carry out of the house? My advice: buy the eBook and print out the chapters you want. Save a tree. Appreciate F# even if you don't plan on shipping code with it.
1 comment:
It's also available on Safari - that's where I've been reading it.
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