Customer Reviews

Elements of Functional Programming (International Computer Science Series)

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This book is one of the most complete references on functional programming out there. At least that you can buy.. there are others that are out of print and darn hard to get. This book contains enough material to take you from absolute beginner to writing your very own interpreters and compilers (including a nice discussion of the SECD machine... dont worry if you dont know what that is though :) . )

If you dont know what functional programming is, read Hudak's book "School of Expression". If you do, read this one to learn more..

This book uses SML instead of Haskell, but then again it was written a while ago, and there is nothing wrong with learning something new (or old...). Even though SML is an eagerly evaluated language, this book discusses lazy versions as well, including some issues with I/O. (Again dont worry if that last bit didnt mean anything to you, these things are described well in the book.. thats where I learned them from!)

Cheers!

Functional programming is very powerful. Now that many popular programming languages are functional (like Ruby or Python and even C++ with functors), a good programmer needs to be conversant with the main concepts.

This book is a very good introduction to what makes FP powerful (ex. higher-order programming, symbolic processing, lazy evaluation, powerful typing systems, etc)