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

Chapter 4.  Basic Pattern Matching

This chapter continues the study of functional programming foundations that the previous chapter opened. It covers basic data pattern matching. Pattern matching is an essential feature-rich mechanism of powerful data processing that is embedded into the F# language's core.

A good grasp of the F# pattern matching features is an absolute must for an enterprise developer because most of the time, enterprise business is revolving around sophisticated data transformations in Line Of Business (LOB) applications (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dragoman/2007/07/19/what-is-a-lob-application/) and along Extract Transform Load (ETL) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load) cycles in data warehousing and business analytics.

I intentionally narrowed down the subject of this chapter to basic pattern matching for a merely didactic reason. Usually, F# beginners first grasp pattern matching as an imperative switch on steroids or just a semantically equivalent...