Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Functional programming books review

alexott.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: Functional programming books review

#31

Post by alexott »

bad_user wrote: post #30
alexott wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I at least briefly went through the almost all books before putting them into list (not counting early releases). It's not required to read every word in the book to understand what's in it.

I've heard about "FP in Scala" and it's loaded into my kindle prepared for vacation (together with many other)...

Re: Functional programming books review

#32

Post by dschiptsov »

_pmf_ wrote: post #28
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.

Well, for me Lisp is a mostly-functional language. In Scheme its quite simple - just avoid set-car! set-cdr! and other destructive primitives when possible, while in CL you should be more careful and disciplined due to lack of agreed upon naming conventions for destructive operations and possible implicit usage of setf in macros. Anyway, even CL could be called mostly-functional.

Re: Functional programming books review

#33

Post by kriro »

I agree on the Prolog recommendations. My suggested path would be:

(1) Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence (first half is sufficient to start) -> (2) The Art of Prolog -> (3) The Craft of Prolog

As a first "get to know the language" I'd add:

http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/a1start.php

You build a basic old-school text adventure in Prolog which is more accessible than the traditionally boring introductions with family databases (imo). It's from amzi but should work with most Prologs, iirc I ran through it with GNU-Prolog (I'd recommend SWI though, it's the best open source implementation out there imo). Uses some metaprogramming that is usually not covered in introductory material (and often considered "use with care") i.e. dynamically updating code with assert/retract

I have only browsed "Warren's Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction" but it's on my to read list. Interesting for anyone that enjoys VM-design and the like.

Re: Functional programming books review

#34

Post by alexott »

BellsOnSunday wrote: post #27

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 an…

Thanks for the hint!

Re: Functional programming books review

#36

Post by brudgers »

_pmf_ wrote: post #28
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.

Throughout, On Lisp emphasizes programming in a functional style. Chapter 3, "Functional Programming" provides a clear presentation of functional programming. More importantly, it shows where and how mutation is used when doing so.

http://www.bookshelf.jp/texi/onlisp/onlisp_4.html#SEC23

Re: Functional programming books review

#37

Post by _pmf_ »

brudgers wrote: post #36
_pmf_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Throughout, On Lisp emphasizes programming in a functional style. Chapter 3, "Functional Programming" provides a clear presentation of functional programming. More importantly, it shows where and how mutation is used when doing so. http://www.bookshelf.jp/texi/onlisp/onlisp_4.html#SEC23

My bad. I confused it with "Practical Common Lisp", which strongly emphasizes doing OOP in Lisp.

Re: Functional programming books review

#39

Post by prawks »

epsylon wrote: post #16
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.

I second that, it's been the best course I've taken up on coursera so far (with Dan Boneh's crypto). The lectures are great, but the best for me was the high quality provided course notes. I read those in my morning and evening commutes and I didn't even have to watch the videos! The exercises were well crafted, guiding you part by part to build your program, and challenging enough that you learned something valuable…

> They are tedious, but for the wrong reasons: you have to make a lot of guesses on what are exactly the semantics of what you're supposed to implement, sifting through the forum and the FAQ for relevant information.

I look at their exercises more from a "I'll do it until I feel I have learned the core concepts" rather than "I'll do it until the grader gives me 100%".

If you're not taking the course for credit, your goal should be learning, not grades. That's what it's all about for me, and learning reactive/functional/Scala programming has little to do with debugging a black box of a grading system.

(Totally agree for those people who paid to receive credit, it must be very frustrating at times)

Post reply on HN