Expert F# (Expert's Voice in .NET)

As much as I have enjoyed and learned from this book in the past 2.5 years, at this time I can only rate it one star, because the F# language has changed a lot since this book was published in 2007.I Strongly Suggest: do not get this older F# book. Instead get a newer F# book.Here are your new-enough choices on Amazon today:Smith  Programming F#: A comprehensive guide for writing simple code to solve complex problems (Animal Guide) Syme  Expert F# 2.0 (The Definitive Guide) Pickering  Beginning F# Petricek  Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C# and lastly a pre-order-only until June 30: Neward  Professional F# 1.0 F# is much newer than many programming languages, for example Python. At this point in Python's history, if you wanted to study Python, you could get by with a book on Python 2.x, rather than a book on current Python 3.x - in fact a lot of shops are still using Python 2.xBut nobody is using F# 1.x anymore! And here in the year 2010 you will hit many more difficulties learning F# from an old F# 1.x book than you would learning Python from an old Python 2.x book.This 2007 book is based on early versions of F# 1.x - get a newer book unless you can find this old one for cheap on a remainder table.My suggestion applies to all F# books: avoid the old ones unless they are on sale for really, really cheap. Specifically: Pay regular price for any F# book published after October 1, 2009. Anything older, pay only a wicked cheap price.Today June 7, 2010 I received my pre-ordered copy of the new Don Syme F# 2.0 book  Expert F# 2.0 (The Definitive Guide) . A good day.

I own the three F# books out there: [FF], [FS] and [EF] (this one).[FF] is the one that got me started, probably because I share some personality traits with the author (based on the way he writes) and that flattened the learning curve.Then [FS] is the book that got me excited about F#'s representational power, mainly because I'm mathematically and scientifically oriented.But from all of them, Expert F# is the one I keep coming back to and the only one that never leaves my desk.This book is hands down the best reference material available. You will find information in this book that you won't find anywhere else, not even in the language's draft specification (which is still work in progress).If you are going to be doing serious F# development you'll need this book, bottom line.

Expert F# does a great job explaining why and how you should use F#. It is not a general purpose tutorial on functional programming. The title "Expert" should be a hint that some (maybe... 25%?) of the topics are going to be advanced and move fast. If you're completely new to functional programming, Real World Haskell (already out) and Real World Functional Programming (Tomas Petricek, 2009) are good resources to get you in the right mindset.Regardless, this book covers the many aspects of F# and is the best general resource on F# so far.

The authors clearly have an intimate understanding of the language. The book presents F# in solid detail, including an explanation of its finer points. The explanations are terse and to the point. For most of us, we will need to play around with the examples to understand them, but that is to be expected in any new language. F# is a great language, and the authors give us the tools to make good use of it.

This is a very well written book, by the original creator of F#. Well worth the money.

The Good- Practical.- High example density.- Broad coverage of a lot of practical F# topics.- Good depth on all the important practical stuff.- I felt like I learned a lot, not only about F#, but about some cool C# features too.- I felt like I'd be a lot more productive as a programmer if I could master the language.The (not so) Bad- Structurally, I initially got lost with some of the more complex examples. And it was straining to page back and forth re-reading things until I grasped the concepts. The density of information in the text sometimes makes it less valuable as a teaching aid and more valuable as a reference.The (not so) Ugly- I could not get one of the async examples to actually compile. I had to search the web for some hints to add declarations that seem to have been omitted from either the example code or F# implementation itself. In short, the example code, my development environment, F# itself, of some combination thereof was missing what appears to be an extension method for WebRequest.GetResponseAsync. I had to code it myself. But once I did, it worked! (This might not be a criticism of the book.)

一応、応用編ということで実際の.NET Framework上で関数型言語をどのように活用するか？といった内容や、マルチスレッド、コンカレントプログラミングに関する記述などもありので参考にはなりますが、この本だけでExpertになれるほどDeepな内容ではないかもしれません。でも、C#のような手続き型言語では結構面倒だったコードもF#では簡潔に書ける例があるということはアピールされていると思います。