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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 13 Ratings

Every computer book begins with "Hallo World"... - 2008-09-05
Reviewer Rating:
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...

There are better F# books out there... - 2009-10-05
Reviewer Rating:
.. like Chris Smith's book. Go get that.

This book is OK, but has some major issues.

For one thing it was written about an early version of F#. A lot of the content is no longer up to date. There are demos in this book that worked last year, but wont even complie now.

My biggest gripe is that while it touches on functional programming, and how it's different from what most VB/C# developers are doing now, it doesn't really teach you to _think_ like a functional programmer. This book will teach you the F# syntax, but you'll just end up writing C# or VB code in F#, missing 90% of the benefits a functional langage provides.

this is the worst book ever - 2009-06-21
Reviewer Rating:
Examples are not explained well and need additional libraries to import.
The book in general is very hard to read.
I wonder if anybody actually reviewed this before it was published.
I would never even have read it if there were more books outhere about F#.

Foundations of F# - 2008-07-08
Reviewer Rating:
Overall I think this was a good book. It served it's purpose well, and even goes through how to create a lot of objects using the programming language. The samples, demos, and explainations were pretty good as well. If you are looking at reading this book, I recommend looking over chapters 8-11. Those are really the meat of the book and where most of your time will be spent.

The things I didnt like were that the examples sometimes were hard to follow. Code would be above or far below the explaination and that was confusing. The other thing is this book is NOT for the beginner level. Its more on the intermediate to expert level. You'll want to have a good understanding of .NET before you pick up this book.

Overall if you are interested in learning F#, I would definately recommend this book.

To me, it has been the other way around. - 2008-10-02
Reviewer Rating:
Some reviewers say other books are more gentle towards the beginner, but honestly in my case it has been the opposite. We have several F# books at the office and I've read fragments from all of them but this is the one that really got me started.

I've been programming (imperatively and OO) for decades and I've used other functional languages such as Scheme but as far as F#, I'm a newcomer.

Obviously, this book doesn't cover certain topics the other books do (like Active Patterns or Workflows) but that's why the book is called "Foundations".

Basically, this book simply does a better job answering my dozens of syntax questions shortly after they arise.
I already know what recursion is, thank you very much, I just needed someone to tell me why the | was sometimes missing after the 'match' keyword or about the 'function' keyword (not to be confused with 'fun') and how it can be used instead of 'match', etc.

Call me obsessive, but all those small snippets of information make a world of difference to me.
I'm sure the other books clarify at least some of these elements in later chapters but I'm the kind of reader that needs his questions answered sooner than later.

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