Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By : Lex Sheehan
Book Image

Learning Functional Programming in Go

By: Lex Sheehan

Overview of this book

Lex Sheehan begins slowly, using easy-to-understand illustrations and working Go code to teach core functional programming (FP) principles such as referential transparency, laziness, recursion, currying, and chaining continuations. This book is a tutorial for programmers looking to learn FP and apply it to write better code. Lex guides readers from basic techniques to advanced topics in a logical, concise, and clear progression. The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming: pure functional programming, manipulating collections, and using higher-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, increase performance, and build better cloud-native applications. The last module covers Category Theory, Functors, Monoids, Monads, Type classes and Generics. By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the FP way.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Summary


Function programming in Go is a paradigm shift, a fundamentally different approach to the way we write software. Just like we can get the results we want with an imperative Turing Machine or with Lambda Calculus, we can choose to code imperatively with idiomatic Go or declaratively using the FP style of programming.

We began our journey with a light introduction to FP. We learned how to write intermediate functions like Map, Filter, and Sort, as well as terminal functions like Reduce and Join, to transform collections. We saw how to use tools like Gleam and Itertool and implemented lazy evaluation using Go routines and a Go channel.

We thought about the characteristics of FP and worked through examples of function composition, closures, and high order functions.

We studied both the imperative-functional and pure-functional styles of software design (and later mixed both styles). We learned how the Reader/Writer interface in Go implements the single responsibility principle. Just one...