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Tomas Petricek

Tomas discovered functional programming as a student at Charles University in Prague. He has been a Microsoft C# MVP since 2004 and is one of the most active members in the F# community. In addition to his work with F#, he has been using C# 3.0 in a functional way since the early previews in 2005. He interned with the F# team at Microsoft Research, and he has developed a client/server web framework for F# called F# WebTools. His articles on functional programming in .NET and various other topics can be found at his web site http://tomasp.net.

Jon Skeet

Jon is a veteran C# and Java developer. His contributions to the software community include thousands of newsgroup posts, hundreds of articles and blog posts, many user group talks, and almost fanatical participation on the Q&A site "Stack Overflow". He was a co-author of Groovy in Action, and more recently wrote the critically acclaimed C# in Depth.

Book News

New chapter excerpt Programming user interfaces using F# workflows from chapter 16 has been published at DotNetSlackers.
15 February 2010
Updated version of the source code [^] is available at MSDN Code Gallery.
4 January 2010
Chapter 4 Exploring F# and .NET libraries by example and Chapter 12 Sequence expressions and alternative workflows are available as free samples.
24 December 2009
The book has been officially released today!
24 December 2009
Book excerpt Tracking Dependencies and Side-Effects Using Immutability from chapter 11 has been published at CodeProject.
7 July 2009
Chapter excerpt Immutable Data Structures in C# and F# has been published at CodeProject.
6 February 2009
Declarative Programming Style article excerpted from chapter 2 has been published.
10 October 2008
Greenpaper about functional programming in C# and F# is available for free.
11 August 2008

Book Resources

Book Links
Follow a reference to the web site from the book text.
Errata
I tried to minimze the number of errors as hard as I could, but some errors are inevitable.
About the Book [^]
Find more information such as the TOC and free chapters.
Book Forum [^]
Discuss available chapters, send your ideas and suggestions.
Source Code [^]
Download F# and C# projects for the published chapters.

Manning Publications

This book is published by Manning Publications. You can find more interesting books from them on their web.

Functional Programming in .NET

Functional programming languages are astonishing for their ability to express ideas in a succinct, declarative way. In the recent years, they became a compeling alternative thanks to their ability to handle the concurrent programming requirements of multi-processor applications. Many of the functional ideas are now available in main-stream langauges including C# 3.0 and Microsoft recently decided to productize functional .NET language called F#.

Real World Functional Programming written by Tomas Petricek with Jon Skeet explores functional programming through the F# and C# languages and presents the new F# language as well as several advanced C# 3.0 concepts. It shows how functional programming differs from other approaches and explains how the ideas look in their clear form in F# as well as how they can be successfully used to solve programming problems in C#. Moving beyond the theory, this book also provides practical examples that apply functional programming to the day-to-day tasks you face as a .NET developer.

More about the book...

Latest Functional Programming Article

Dynamic in F#: Reading data from SQL database

When reading data from a SQL database in F#, you have a couple of options. You can use F# implementation of LINQ, which allows you to write queries directly in the F# language or you can use standard ADO.NET classes such as SqlCommand. The second option is often good enough - when you just need to call a simple query, you probably don't want to setup the whole LINQ infrastructure (generate classes, reference F# PowerPack, etc.) Unfortunately, ADO.NET classes are a bit ugly to use. When calling an SQL stored procedure, you need to specify the name of the procedure as a string, you need to add parameters one-by-one by creating instances of SqlParameter, you need to dynamically cast results from the obj type and so on...

In this article, we'll look how to use the dynamic operator to make the experience of using ADO.NET from F# dramatically better. Dynamic operator (there are actually two of them) are a simple way of supporting dynamic invoke in F#. We can use it to write code that looks almost like an ordinary method call or property access, but is resolved dynamically at runtime (using the name of the method or property). The following example shows what we'll be able to write at the end of this article:

// Call 'GetProducts' procedure with 'CategoryID' set to 1
use conn = new DynamicSqlConnection(connectionString)
use cmd = conn?GetProducts
cmd?CategoryID <- 1
conn.Open()

// Read all products and print their names
use reader = cmd.ExecuteReader()
while reader.Read() do
  printfn "Product: %s" reader?ProductName

If you ever tried to call a SQL stored procedure directly using the SqlCommand, then you can surely appreciate the elegance of this code snippet. Let's now take a look at a larger example and some of the neat tricks that make this possible...

Read the complete article
Tomas Petricek | July 09, 2010