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Functional programming books review

alexott.net

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Re: Functional programming books review

#21

Post by James_Duval »

agumonkey wrote: post #19
platz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What background did you have ? I remember people who knew a bit of lisp and fp were fine, but many newcomers went mad when it came to meta-levels and interpretation.

I had absolutely no FP background and I found it fantastic.

Hard, yes, but fantastic.

You have to be prepared to put in the hours that the course says you should put in, and you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time reading about other people's confusion on the discussion forums.

Re: Functional programming books review

#22

Post by amirmc »

To the author: The section on 'Caml and Objective Caml' should be renamed to 'OCaml' as that's the official name of language in recent years.

Also, the ordering of books is best done in reverse chronological order. Improvements are made in different compiler versions so it would cause frustration for a new reader if they come across a disconnect. I suspect the same is true for other languages listed. The most recent books are 'OCaml from the very beginning' [1] (released earlier this year) and 'Real World OCaml' [2] (released a few weeks ago). You can find these and other OCaml books listed at: http://ocaml.org/learn/books.html

[1] http://ocaml-book.com/

[2] https://realworldocaml.org/

Re: Functional programming books review

#23

Post by agumonkey »

James_Duval wrote: post #21
agumonkey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What background did you have ? I remember people who knew a bit of lisp and fp were fine, but many newcomers went mad when it came to meta-levels and interpretation.

I had absolutely no FP background and I found it fantastic. Hard, yes, but fantastic. You have to be prepared to put in the hours that the course says you should put in, and you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time reading about other people's confusion on the discussion forums.

Happy to see you have such a positive attitude about hard learning. It pained me to see noobs being depressed and self-deprecative on the irc channel. I understand their feelings, I felt the same before it was all blurry, the irony is that I couldn't explain them how I got to understanding, it was just maturation, which they didn't wanna hear about.

Re: Functional programming books review

#24

Post by bad_user »

alexott wrote: post #18
bad_user wrote: post #17

I don't like this article. Lots of people do a Google-search on books on various topics, then publish a blog article without having read them. I'm seeing books in there that are awful choices. And oh look, the Amazon articles are tagged, which means the author gets affiliate compensations. And what do you know, it's the hollyday season, so people buy stuff on Amazon. And don't get me wrong, I'm fine with that, I did…

Why do you think that I didn't read the books? Do you know anything about me to make such comments? P.S. About affiliation links - it's written clearly in the 2nd paragraph of the page.

(1)

      $ curl http://alexott.net/en/fp/books/ 2>/dev/null | \
        grep -o 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/[a-zA-Z0-9]*' | \
        sort -u | wc -l

      132
Seriously, you've read 132 technical books, for 10 different languages, going back to 2009?

(2) I'm seeing books that have been OK-ish when they appeared and thus recommended by people, either because of lack of other choices, but also because the advice contained was the status quo, but right now are pretty bad choices. "Programming Scala", by Alex Payne, for example is an awful reference to put on any list of books for Scala. It contains bad practices, plus lots of references to obsolete parts of the standard library, not to mention its general flow is just awful. If you would have read it, you would have known. "Programming Scala" the one published by the Pragmatic Programmers, is another awful choice. Actually, all books on Scala published before 2010 are awful choices.

(3) What the hell does a book on Scalatra has to do with Functional Programming? Is it because the association with Scala or something?

(4) It's bad advice to tell people to buy books from Amazon. The E-Books are DRM-enabled Kindle versions, sometimes badly formated and you don't get the PDF. Many of those books have the same price if you buy straight from their publishers and you get both a DRM-free Kindle version and the PDF.

Re: Functional programming books review

#25

Post by agumonkey »

I remember a wonderful website about functional programming in python, not about the classic map/fold/list, but about solving numerical problems in a functional manner (somehow monadic in structure, without saying it). I could never find it again, maybe someone knows it.

Re: Functional programming books review

#26

Post by alexott »

amirmc wrote: post #22

To the author: The section on 'Caml and Objective Caml' should be renamed to 'OCaml' as that's the official name of language in recent years. Also, the ordering of books is best done in reverse chronological order. Improvements are made in different compiler versions so it would cause frustration for a new reader if they come across a disconnect. I suspect the same is true for other languages listed. The most recent…

thank you, I'll incorporate your suggestions...

Re: Functional programming books review

#27

Post by BellsOnSunday »

The classics section is missing one of my favourites, Recursive Programming Techniques by Wm Burge. A beautiful book that was ultra cutting-edge at the time (1975) but still a very effective exploration of the elegance of FP, techniques and patterns that are useful today, ideas with the potential to provide satori moments for anyone learning the paradigm, issues arising from laziness etc etc. You can read it today and treat the language used as a notation, like a dynamically-typed Haskell IIRC. The best £1.54 you'll ever spend! -- http://www.amazon.co.uk/Recursive-Programming-Techniques-sys...

Re: Functional programming books review

#28

Post by _pmf_ »

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…

> On Lisp books by pg

While Lisp can be used in a functional manner, the book does not really qualify as a book on functional programming.

Re: Functional programming books review

#29

Post by alexott »

bad_user wrote: post #24
alexott wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that I didn't read the books? Do you know anything about me to make such comments? P.S. About affiliation links - it's written clearly in the 2nd paragraph of the page.

(1) $ curl http://alexott.net/en/fp/books/ 2>/dev/null | \ grep -o 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/[a-zA-Z0-9]*' | \ sort -u | wc -l 132 Seriously, you've read 132 technical books, for 10 different languages, going back to 2009? (2) I'm seeing books that have been OK-ish when they appeared and thus recommended by people, either because of lack of other choices, but also because the advice contained was the status q…

I read a lot & not all books were released in 2009-2013...

if you look to the page more precisely - it has a separate section, called Recommendations where only some of books are listed.

Regarding the Amazon - the 2nd paragraph clearly says "if possible" - nobody forces you to buy books from amazon!

Re: Functional programming books review

#30

Post by bad_user »

alexott wrote: post #29
bad_user wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) $ curl http://alexott.net/en/fp/books/ 2>/dev/null | \ grep -o 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/[a-zA-Z0-9]*' | \ sort -u | wc -l 132 Seriously, you've read 132 technical books, for 10 different languages, going back to 2009? (2) I'm seeing books that have been OK-ish when they appeared and thus recommended by people, either because of lack of other choices, but also because the advice contained was the status q…

I read a lot & not all books were released in 2009-2013... if you look to the page more precisely - it has a separate section, called Recommendations where only some of books are listed. Regarding the Amazon - the 2nd paragraph clearly says "if possible" - nobody forces you to buy books from amazon!

Lets do the math - this isn't fiction we're talking about, it takes at least 2 weeks to read a technical book and this is assuming you can read at least 1 or several chapters per day, or maybe skipping chapters, which can't happen for many of those books, as some of them are pretty challenging and you have to think about what you're reading, you have to try out samples, you have to do extra reading to clarify stuff and so on.

But lets be generous and say that 2 weeks is the average for reading a technical book. And there are on average 52 weeks in a year.

    132 * 2 / 52 = 5.08
So that's 5 years worth of book reading, assuming that (a) you're reading each and every single day, without exceptions, without breaks and (b) that you aren't reading anything else. Why the heck won't you admit that you haven't read some of them and simply pasted links based on Amazon's recommendations or something?

Also, the section on recommendations is shallow. It references books for getting started, after which it gives advice to continue with the books above. And I'm not seeing negative remarks on the referenced books at all. Everybody has opinions on whether a book was good or not. What kind of review doesn't do that?

"Functional Programming in Scala" is an awesome book on functional programming btw. You should put that as a recommended book.

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