F# is a multiparadigm programming language that encompasses object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming language properties. Now adopted in a wide range of application areas and 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 and creating music focused ads for Spotify, Pandora, Shazam, and anywhere on the web.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with F#, explains how to get started with F# with Visual Studio. A Simple hello world program is created and details about the project structure and file ordering and the differences between F# and C# in terms of usage are discussed.
Chapter 2, Functional Core with F#, teaches you about the functional core of F#, such as data types, type declarations, immutability, strong type interference, pattern matching, records, F# data structures, sequence expressions, lazy evaluation, making side effects explicit, and so on.
Chapter 3, Data Structures in F#, helps you understand how to use the available data structures in F# and write some basic custom data structures.
Chapter 4, Imperative Programming in F#, teaches you how to use control structures, more idiomatic .NET with F#, and interfacing with C# and generics.
Chapter 5, Asynchronous Programming, goes through the asynchronous programming model in F#, with a bit of cross-referencing or comparison drawn with the C# world.
Chapter 6, Type Providers, talks about some of the most common type providers, and additionally, also looks at the Query build that will help write LINQ-like queries for our custom collections.
Chapter 7, Web Programming in F#, teaches you how to build web servers using some of the most common .NET libraries as well as how you can write code for the browser in F# using WebSharper or Fable.
Chapter 8, Application Development in F#, explains how to write cross-platform desktop applications in F# using Fable and the Github Electron project.
Chapter 9, Testing in F#, teaches you how to write unit tests in F# with popular tools, and the advantages the language offers for this.
Chapter 10, Distributed Programming in F#, delves into using F# to implement the actor model popularized by Erlang, in order to write more robust software using decoupled actors that can run on different machines over a network and heal themselves in the eventuality of failure.
All you need for this book is a computer that can comfortably run the following software applications: An F# IDE like Visual Studio 2015 (with Visual F# Power Tools), Visual Studio for Mac or Visual Studio Code with the Ionide extension.
If you are a C# developer with a basic knowledge of F# and want to explore the functional programming paradigm further to master your F# skills, then this book is for you.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The class overrides a ToString function from the base class."
A block of code is set as follows:
let x = 20
if not (x < 10) then
printfn "x is greater than 10"Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
> let p = new Point(10, 20);;
val p : Point = Point 10, 20
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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