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Functional programming books review

alexott.net

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Re: Functional programming books review

#2

Post by bridger »

If anyone wants to read SICP and would like a buddy to read it with, let me know! I am working on an iPad app for people to study together and we are trying SICP as one of our first courses. I am reading it for my first time. It is an enlightening book! bridger@understudyapp.com

Re: Functional programming books review

#3

Post by ek »

Great list!

A lot of the stuff there is to know about functional programming is still only contained in academic papers, and indeed many of these listed books are texts in programming languages that cite a great deal of the important literature. There is much about programming languages and functional programming that one might read interspersed with these books. Other than following references in the backs of many of these books, the Haskell wiki is a good place for starting to dig into literature on functional programming, as many articles link to important and interesting papers.

On that note it's a bit strange not to see a few books on semantics, such as Transitions and Trees or Semantics Engineering with PLT Redex, listed among books like TAPL and Barendregt's Lambda Calculus. Especially now that DSL design is something many programmers are dabbling in, it makes sense to gain some background on operational semantics. I'd recommend either of these books to anyone working on DSLs, especially in a functional language.

Finally, it might be worth adding Homotopy Type Theory to your list, especially since the list already contains several good books about Coq as well as works about type theory and type systems.

Re: Functional programming books review

#4

Post by platz »

ek wrote: post #3

Great list! A lot of the stuff there is to know about functional programming is still only contained in academic papers, and indeed many of these listed books are texts in programming languages that cite a great deal of the important literature. There is much about programming languages and functional programming that one might read interspersed with these books. Other than following references in the backs of many o…

I'll second Haskell wiki. It has some of the most detailed explanations of functional concepts I've come across.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Fold

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monad

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/All_About_Monads

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Learn_Haskell_in_10_minut...

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Typeclassopedia

Also check out http://adit.io/ for some great tutorials with pictures

Re: Functional programming books review

#6

Post by dschiptsov »

This is excellent review, no doubt, by a well known scholar.) The only problem is that there are so many books and so little time.

So, to get a quick and productive crash-course I would recommend just a few selected resources.

* SICP based course CS 61A by Brian Harvey (Youtube)

* HtDP2 and a wonderful course based on it - Introduction to Systematic Program Design by Gregor Kiczales (the author of The Art Of Metaobject Protocol)

* Armstrong's thesys armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf‎ and his Programming Erlang book.

* Programming Languages course by Dan Grossman (also on Coursera)

* Two Scala courses Martin Odersky

* The classic Haskell tutorial http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/

* ANSI CL and On Lisp books by pg.

This is a very decent start in my opinion. "To learn quickly read only the best ones".

Re: Functional programming books review

#7

Post by iamabhishek »

Functional programming is the best, a classic approach for a smooth simple development. And this review was simply amazing. I saw this website a few days back, http://studytonight.com which is really nice, if we talk about simple lessons.

I saw some really great videos there about concept of programming and data structures.

{pretty impressed}

Re: Functional programming books review

#8

Post by platz »

dschiptsov wrote: post #6

This is excellent review, no doubt, by a well known scholar.) The only problem is that there are so many books and so little time. So, to get a quick and productive crash-course I would recommend just a few selected resources. * SICP based course CS 61A by Brian Harvey (Youtube) * HtDP2 and a wonderful course based on it - Introduction to Systematic Program Design by Gregor Kiczales (the author of The Art Of Metaobje…

Grossman's PL course is not the hardest of them all, but it did provide had the most value, compared to the other Coursera courses I've taken. Truly excellent.

Re: Functional programming books review

#9

Post by eru »

frrp wrote: post #5

Nice and useful! If you are in Hong Kong, we have a meetup group here: http://www.meetup.com/HK-Functional-programming/ We are mostly working on Martin Odersky's Coursera courses and SICP book exercises.

I should have know about that meetup the last time I was in Hong Kong.

We have also revived the FP meetup in Singapore. Drop me a line, if you are interested, dear reader. (Email in profile.)

Re: Functional programming books review

#10

Post by OnionChamp »

This is a list of amazon referral links to books related to functional programming, with a ~2-sentence blurb about each that could be written in 10 minutes with the help of google. It's a nice way for him to make some referral money but otherwise it's nothing special. The guy probably hasn't opened half of the books here.
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