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


We manipulate collections constantly in our code. We often start with a list of items and need to transform our initial list into another list of different items. Sometimes, we want to map our list to another list of equal size. Sometimes, we want to group and sort our list. Other times, we need to arrive at a single result value.

In this chapter, we explored the different types (intermediate and terminal) of collection functors. We dived into a few key areas of collection manipulation, including iterators, the map function, the contains method, and chaining of functions.

We looked at a few Go packages that provide a cadre of high-order functions that we can use in our new functional style of programming.

We gained an appreciation for Unix pipes and discovered that a new distributed processing Go package, named Gleam, leverages pipe to deliver a lightweight Go-based functional solution.

In the next chapter, we'll dive deeper into pipelining and see how it can improve performance.