The Book of F#: Breaking Free with Managed Functional Programming

Disappointed... I found that this book wasn't in depth enough to be a reference but too short on whys and hows to be an instructional book. I suppose that if you've already read an F# reference or two and wanted to reinforce your knowledge then this book would be a good fit. For me, I was hoping for something that would help me "think functionally" and it didn't do that for me since it was more about language features than how best to use those features. That said it didn't explain the language features as clearly and precisely as I would have liked. Maybe this is just a case of unrealistic expectations on my part based on prior reviews.

This is a great introduction to F# and by extension functional programming. The primary downside of the book is that like many coding texts, it’s fairly dry.

It has what I wanted. I used it to help me with my Visual Studio for functional programming and type matching.

Good introduction to F# and gets you quickly started (with Visual Studio). Covers lots of concepts. However, it does leave you with some unanswered questions here and there. All in all a nice read for beginners.

Excellent book. Highly recommend for devs looking to learn functional programming.

Great book. The best introduction to the subject of f# that I've read.

[Disclosure: I've received a free copy of this book for reviewing]I've read a lot of books on F# over the past several years, and I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those wanting to start learning the language and have some programming experience. Dave Fancher covers a lot of ground in this book, including object-oriented and functional styles of programming, pattern matching, quotations, computation expressions, and type providers, to name a few. In addition, Fancher's style is easy to follow and fun to read.A few things to consider:1. If you are new to programming, this book will not meet all your needs. Fancher compares a F# with other styles of programming, especially C#.2. If you know F# well, you may pick up a few new tricks. I did, and I was glad to have read the book; however, you may want to look for something more advanced like Expert F# or F# Deep Dives.3. I would have liked a bit more meat in the sections on quotations, computation expressions, and type providers. The section on quotations is one of the best in any books I've read. The section on computation expressions showed a good example but didn't list out everything that can be done with the feature. Finally, type providers were discussed, but their creation was left out.If you are just beginning to explore F#, this is the book for you.

[Disclaimer: I've received a free copy of this book for reviewing]For a couple of years, I've been wanting to take a deep look at F#. Unfortunately, work and my lack of knowledge in the functional area kept me away from it because most of the books I've seen explain F# for the guy that has (at least) some experience with functional programming.Fortunately for me, Dave has taken the time to write The Book of F#. This book is great if you're coming from other languages and you don't grasp the basics about functional programming. Besides teaching you the syntax, the author will also introduce you to the main concepts related with functional programming and it will even compare the approach used in F# with what you'd need to do in C#.I've just finished reading the book, so there's still a lot to take in. However, I can assure you that the contents are good and that I'll be using this book daily when I start my next project with F#.Overall, I'm giving it a 9/10.

If you write code you should learn F#... but this book if a bit light wieght.

Well written and to the point, that's the book I was looking for for a good description of F# 3.1.

The book delivers a very good starting-point for learning F#. But there is one major drawback for the kindle-edition: all code-examples are rendered without line-breaks (for whatever reason).This is very annoying, especially with F#'s line-based syntax. Unexperienced programmers may have a hard time figuring out the correct syntax of the examples. Let's just hope that this will be fixed some time...

Summary: this is not a bad book, just not "the one", at least for me. I will refer to it in the future, but as indicated at the bottom I found better resources to teach the language.F# is my favorite functional language, since at least for me reading/writing it - is as close I have at this point to thinking the algorithm. That said, I read somewhere that F# has 97 keywords (compared e.g. to Scala's 40'ish). Meaning that mastering this language requires to go through quite a lot. Unfortunately this book was not the one book I will turn to for that task.It did nice job with a lot of chapters but also horrible job with others - such as the Object Oriented one. With so much to cover in this language, I think that listing everything is just not the right approach for someone who wants to get her/his head around the language. I like a top to bottom approach. Understanding the high level and then drilling. I could not get that sense through the book.Moreover, I personally did not like much the notion of forward reference. The writer describes a lot of examples which you will get only later in the book/chapter. I find this confusing and discouraging when learning a new language. Luckily this was not my first book, but still it felt odd when I had to get a page or two, not grasping the examples.My recommendation to anyone is to follow two online sources ... which in combination seem like the best way to learn the language:Primarily the online wikibook for F# - which I highly recommend! ...[...]As a side reference the MSDN F# language reference ...[...]