Learn F# for the masses

Anyone who reads my blog will have observed that I’ve not posted anything for several months now. In addition to my moving country and trying to build a company in 2016, I’ve also been writing a book.

I’m delighted to now share that Learn F# is now available on Manning’s MEAP program – hopefully the book will be content complete within the next couple of months.

The book is designed specifically for C# and VB .NET developers who are already familiar with Visual Studio and the .NET ecosystem to get up to speed with F#. Half the book focuses on core language features, whilst the second half looks at practical use cases of F# in areas such as web programming, data access and interoperability.

The book doesn’t focus on theoretical aspects of functional programming – so no discussion of monads or category theory here – but rather attempts to explain to the reader the core fundamentals of functional programming (at least, in my opinion) and apply them in a practical sense. In this sense I think that the book doesn’t overlap too much with many of the F# books out there – it doesn’t give you a hardcore understanding of the mathematical fundamentals of FP, and relates many concepts to those that the reader will already be familiar with in C# etc.. – but it will give you confidence to use, explore and learn more about F# alongside what you already know.

I’d like to think it will appeal to those developers that are already on the .NET platform and want to see how they can utilise and benefit from F# within their “day-to-day” without having to throw away everything they’ve learned so far. So you’ll see how to perform data access more easily without resorting to Entity Framework, how to perform error handling in F# in a more sane manner, parsing data files, and creating web APIs, whilst using FP & F#-specific language features directly in solving those problems.

I’ll blog about my experiences of writing a book when it’s done – for now, I hope that this book is well received and a useful addition to the excellent learning materials already available in the F# world.