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)

Observables


In .NET, the IObservable interface was introduced in the .NET 4.0 framework edition; basically, it is a generalized mechanism for push-based notifications, also known as the observer design pattern. The IObservable<'T> interface represents the class that sends notifications (provider) and the IObserver<'T> interface represents the class that receives from them (the observer). The provider must implement a single method, Subscribe, which indicates that an observer wants to receive push-based notifications. This method returns an IDisposable interface object that can be used to cancel observers any time before the provider has stopped sending them.

Observables are very similar to our F# first-class events, with the inheritance chain of IEvent from IObservable interface; it is possible to use the same combinations from event to observables. One advantage of using IObservables is that it returns an IDisposable object for a processing pipeline; this object can be used to...