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

51–59 of 59 posts

Re: Functional programming books review

#51

Post by pseut »

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…

It doesn't take two weeks to read a technical book that covers material you already know. I have no opinion on the site's reviews, but it's completely possible to read hundreds of very technical books, as long as the material overlaps.

Re: Functional programming books review

#52

Post by alexott »

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…

thanks - I'm usually updating this list every 2-3 months, when I have long weekend or something like...

Re: Functional programming books review

#53

Post by codygman »

platz wrote: post #4
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 wit…

The functors, applicatives, and monads in pictures tutorial[1] just made so many things click for me. Those are all very very good resources indeed!

1. http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_...

Re: Functional programming books review

#54

Post by tel »

mej10 wrote: post #47
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…

Why Homotopy Type Theory? It is cutting edge research and it doesn't seem clear to me that it is going to have an impact on functional programming (of the non-mathematical research type) any time soon. Am I mistaken?

It seems to have quickly "infected" literature on dependent types at large---not to the point of having replaced the normal terminology, but instead as forming a sort of common framework for examining those fields.

Which is definitely a point on the side of "has no impact".

But on the other hand, I think studying dependent types is a fantastic way to get some perspective as an intermediate to advanced Haskell or OCaml programmer. Software Foundations and Certified Programming with Dependent Types are both great books to read.

HoTT won't be on that list for some time if ever, but once you've got a good mental model for dependent types it's illuminating to see them worked out "from scratch" as HoTT does.

So, the best I can say is that it can be influential in the way that you view types if you're someone who frequently programs and thinks in a nicely typed language like Haskell/OCaml and maybe Scala.

Re: Functional programming books review

#55

Post by incision »

bad_user wrote: post #46
incision wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I'm seeing books in there that are awful choices." At the very least, you could mention which and why. There's a hell of a lot more value in... "The ZINC experiment: an economical implementation of the ML language is a technical report, written by Xavier Leroy (author of OCaml) in 1990th, and it contains pretty detailed description of ML-like language implementation. This report could be very interesting for all w…

I've stated my opinion, I mentioned that I did it myself, placing affiliate tags on book links (in the comment you're replying to), no I didn't want to draw attention to my own blog because it would have been off-topic and yes, I gave explanations in this same thread. What you're doing is a direct ad-hominem btw. I don't need qualifications to infer that it's impossible for somebody to read 132 books on some of the h…

You've completely missed the point on multiple counts. Discussion isn't a zero-sum game, you don't have to do battle with every comment.

Re: Functional programming books review

#56

Post by bad_user »

incision wrote: post #55
bad_user wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stated my opinion, I mentioned that I did it myself, placing affiliate tags on book links (in the comment you're replying to), no I didn't want to draw attention to my own blog because it would have been off-topic and yes, I gave explanations in this same thread. What you're doing is a direct ad-hominem btw. I don't need qualifications to infer that it's impossible for somebody to read 132 books on some of the h…

You've completely missed the point on multiple counts. Discussion isn't a zero-sum game, you don't have to do battle with every comment.

Sorry, tough period, I'm very bitchy lately, I hate winter holidays.

Re: Functional programming books review

#57

Post by DannoHung »

bad_user wrote: post #56
incision wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely missed the point on multiple counts. Discussion isn't a zero-sum game, you don't have to do battle with every comment.

Sorry, tough period, I'm very bitchy lately, I hate winter holidays.

Can you please call out which books are bad though? That's some very useful information. I know I've read books that were garbage that are very highly recommended. (Code Complete as a "guide to the craft of programming", for example is extremely poor when compared to The Pragmatic Programmer). And even if I disagree with your judgements in some cases, it's good for calibration.

Re: Functional programming books review

#58

Post by ek »

mej10 wrote: post #47
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…

Why Homotopy Type Theory? It is cutting edge research and it doesn't seem clear to me that it is going to have an impact on functional programming (of the non-mathematical research type) any time soon. Am I mistaken?

The book on Homotopy Type Theory is quite readable even though the developments are quite new. The purpose of the book is to get the material into the hands of as many as it may be useful to as soon as possible.

I would argue that the book is at least as useful as Categories for the Working Mathematician or Barendregt's Lambda Calculus are likely to be for your typical software engineer interested in functional programming. To be clear, someone interested only in learning how to program in functional languages is probably not going to get very much from either of those books, which are respectively an extremely technical mathematical text on topics in category theory, and a heavily logic-oriented, mathematical presentation of the lambda calculus and derivatives thereof. Not much of the material in either book would be directly applicable to the practice of software engineering using functional languages, but someone with a deeper interest would find them useful and interesting, and I think the same holds for the HoTT book. At the very least, as the other commenter alluded to, a novice reader would probably be able to glean a nice understanding of Martin-Löf dependent type theory from the first chapter.

Re: Functional programming books review

#59

Post by jacques_chester »

alexott wrote: post #12
OnionChamp wrote: post #10

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.

please, generate it yourself (without looking into this list) and track how much time you need to do this... I've compiled this list long time ago as an article for Russian FP journal, and it takes relatively much time to track new books, obtain them (paying myself or get through Safari Online), read or at least briefly go through it, and write a short review... P.S. regarding the referral money - don't think that it…

I'll second this. I review books on my blog[1] and set it up so that visitors can choose whether or not to follow the referral link or a non-referral link.

About 2/3rds of people follow the referral link.

Out of the several thousand pageviews and several hundred clickthroughs, I've accrued a grand total of about $60.

Unless you have thousands of clickthroughs, or you spruik products with high impulse value, Amazon referral links are not very lucrative.

[1] http://chester.id.au/book-reviews/

Post reply on HN