Book Image

Mastering F#

By : Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad
Book Image

Mastering F#

By: Alfonso García-Caro Núñez, Suhaib Fahad

Overview of this book

F# is a multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and is supported both by industry-leading companies who provide professional tools and by an active open community, F# is rapidly gaining popularity as it emerges in digital music advertising, creating music-focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web. This book will guide you through the basics and will then help you master F#. The book starts by explaining how to use F# with Visual Studio, file ordering, and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage. It moves on to explain the functional core of F# such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, and lazy evaluation. Next, the book takes you through imperative and asynchronous programming, F# type providers, applications, and testing in F#. Finally, we look into using F# with distributed programming and using F# as a suitable language for data science. In short, this book will help you learn F# for real-world applications and increase your productivity with functional programming.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 1. Getting Started in F#

F# is a functional first language in the .NET family and is a derivative of the Meta-Language (ML) family of languages. It shares many features with dialects of ML, which originally derives from the classical ML language designed by Robin Milner in 1973 at the University of Edinburgh. As a .NET language, F# code compiles to Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which runs on top of Common Language Runtime (CLR).

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The key features of F#
  • The functional and imperative languages
  • Using F# with Visual Studio
  • Basic expressions in F#