Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

"What" prevailing over "how"


This property of the functional solution mental process is easier to demonstrate with an example. I paraphrase here the great one from the early days of F# that's been used by several insiders previously. Imagine yourself in Starbucks for Caffè Americano.

The "how" approach would be to give detailed instructions such as:

  1. Take a roasted coffee

  2. Brew two espresso shots

  3. Top them with hot water to produce a layer of crema

  4. Put it into a cap of 12 oz size

The "what" approach would be to just ask "May I have a tall Caffè Americano?".

The second approach is evidently much more succinct and minimizes an opportunity of getting a result that deviates from the desired one. If you revisit now our three preceding solutions you should spot this property there.