Foundations of F# (Expert's Voice in .Net) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Functional programming (FP) is the future of .NET programming, and F# is much more than just an FP language. Every professional .NET programmer needs to learn about FP, and theres no better way to do it than by learning F#and no easier way to learn F# than from Foundations of F#.

If youre already familiar with FP, youll find F# the language youve always dreamed of. And all .NET programmers will find F# an exciting real-world alternative to C# and Visual Basic. This book is likely to have many imitators, but few true competitors. Written by F# evangelist Rob Pickering, and tech reviewed by F#s main designer, Don Syme, this is an elegant, comprehensive introduction to all aspects of the language and an incisive guide to using F# for real-world professional development. F# is the future of programming (not just on .NET), and the future is now.

About the Author

Robert Pickering is an extraordinarily prolific writer on F#. The F# Wiki on his Strangelights.com web site is among the most popular F# web sites in the world. He is a consultant for LexiFi, lives in France, and works on projects in England, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium. He received his bachelor's of science in computer science from Manchester University in 1999.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Apress (May 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597575
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597576
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #352,159 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buggy and needs work, July 3, 2007

By	Rakesh Malik (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm working through this, and even in the first chapter, I ran into quite a few errors. Some of the code does not compile as presented, and some examples use syntax that is not explained anywhere that I can find.

Obviously, that makes learning F# from this book much more difficult than it should be, but when the author takes the time to explain something, it is explained fairly well. When the examples work, they help to illustrate the point. Most of the time, I've been able to get the code to compile when there are errors in the code because of the explanation that goes with it. Some of the time however, the combination of unexplained syntax and buggy code leaves me in a bit of a bind.

This book could have been much better with a better proofreader.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Functional but frustrating, August 21, 2007

By	Brad S. Williams (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For a reader who already knows some F#, I think this book could be helpful. In the 100-page language tutorial, it seems to give a wide (though necessarily shallow) coverage of the syntax and programming paradigms of F#. Since there is a lot to the language, many readers will find something new to consider here. Then there are several chapters of applied F#: extremely brief explanations and samples of an ASP.NET app, a WinForm app, etc, written in F#. I'm suspicious that these chapters would be very useful to anyone: to those new to .NET, there is really not enough information here to get oriented; to working .NET programmers (which must be the widest audience for this book) there's just very little to learn here.

Now, as someone completely new to F#, I found reading this book consistently frustrating. While the author obviously knows the subject, the presentation is not very accessible. The main problems I see are: (1) example code usually *follows* its explanation, which just confounds me why an author would do this; and (2) the prose is hard to read, containing tedious explanations of syntax, and an odd over-use of the second-person "you" when walking through an example that I found disorienting.

Ultimately I spent a lot of time feeling frustrated trying to figure out what the author was saying, and wondering why it wasn't said more clearly. Judging from the sample chapters of Don Syme's book on his blog, I know that F# can be made accessible to the beginner. This book needed more editing to get there.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Every computer book begins with "Hallo World"..., September 4, 2008

By	lew "lwndw123" (Connecticut, USA) - See all my reviews

Every computer programming book begins with "Hello World". This one, too. The only problem: "Hello World" program doesn't work. It generates cryptic message saying that some DLLs must be linked, but how linked?... God knows. It took me a week of detective work to figure it out that on page 307 there is compiler command that should be used. Now I am having next problem, and after a week of detective work still don't have solution.

It seems that F# is being developed faster than books are printed, and books are talking about version of language and tools than don't exist any more.

The same problems with other F# books...