Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By : Gene Belitski
Book Image

F# 4.0 Design Patterns

By: Gene Belitski

Overview of this book

Following design patterns is a well-known approach to writing better programs that captures and reuses high-level abstractions that are common in many applications. This book will encourage you to develop an idiomatic F# coding skillset by fully embracing the functional-first F# paradigm. It will also help you harness this powerful instrument to write succinct, bug-free, and cross-platform code. F# 4.0 Design Patterns will start off by helping you develop a functional way of thinking. We will show you how beneficial the functional-first paradigm is and how to use it to get the optimum results. The book will help you acquire the practical knowledge of the main functional design patterns, the relationship of which with the traditional Gang of Four set is not straightforward. We will take you through pattern matching, immutable data types, and sequences in F#. We will also uncover advanced functional patterns, look at polymorphic functions, typical data crunching techniques, adjusting code through augmentation, and generalization. Lastly, we will take a look at the advanced techniques to equip you with everything you need to write flawless code.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
F# 4.0 Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Data transformation patterns


A good question about data transformation libraries richness would be: Where does such an overwhelming variety come from in the first place? Why do designers of F# include as many as hundred-something functions over base data collections into the core library?

I believe a single "right" answer to this question simply does not exist. However, some clues may come from considering a typical ETL - Extract, Transform, Load (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load) enterprise data crunching process. In the world of mutable collections and arbitrarily changing states, this operation can be expressed as follows:

void PerformETL() 
{ 
    ExtractData(); 
    TransformData(); 
    LoadData(); 
} 

This C#-like pseudocode demonstrates how literally gazillions of possible data transformations can be hidden behind the same few opaque lines of code. We cannot say anything about the details until we meticulously delve into the implementation...