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)

F# Collections


F# core library has a set of collections and wrapper functional style modules that are useful. In this chapter, we will go through the basic list of collection modules with examples and understand their inner workings.

The following is a basic list of collection modules:

  • Seq: This performs basic operations on any collection implementing IEnumerable<'T>
  • Array: This performs basic operations on Array collections
  • List: This performs basic operations on List collections
  • Map: This performs functional style operators for the Map type
  • Set: This performs functional style operators for the Set type

Sequence

Sequence is a logical series of elements of the same type. Sequences are lazy in nature and always iterate a single element at any given time, so it has better performance over large collections when compared to arrays or lists. Sequences are basically the .NET IEnumerable<'T> collections that have an alias seq<'T> type in F#. The Seq module provides several helper functions...