Update on the F# Deep Dives book

It has been some time since I last wrote about F# Deep Dives - a new project that I'm working on together with Manning, Phil Trelford and a number of F# experts, so I'd like to write a quick update. In summary, working on a book with more than 10 co-authors is more difficult than one would think (and 10 people cannot write a book in 1/10 of the time :-)), but now that the holidays are almost over, you can expect more frequent updates again!

First of all, I should mention that you can buy the Early Access preview of the book from Manning and there is already one in advance review of the book from Ted Neward (thanks!) who says:

As of this writing, the early-access [...] version had only Chapters 3 and Chapter 11, but the other topics [...] are juicy and meaty. [T]he prose from the MEAP edition is pretty easy to read already, despite the fact that it's early-access material. In particular, the Markdown parser they implement in chapter 3 is a great example of a non-trivial language parser, which is not an easy task (...).

Available chapters

As I mentioned, the book is unique in that it is not written just by me and Phil - each chapter is written by a real-world F# expert and many of them use F# in production. The disadvantage is that they are all busy people, but we have close to half of the planned chapters available already.

• Parsing text-based languages (written by myself) explains how I wrote the Markdown parser used for generating this web site, documentation for many F# projects.

• Numerical computing in finance domain (by Chao-Jen Chen from the University of Chicago) deals with mathematical methods for pricing stock options and discusses topics such as geometric brownian motion and Monte Carlo simulations.

• Integrating Stock Data into the F# Language (by Ketih Battocchi who worked on type providers for Microsoft) is, unsurprisingly, about type providers! It explains how to extend CSV provider and write a type provider specifically for getting historical stock prices.

• Creating games using XNA (by Johann Deneux, author of F# for Game Development discusses how to elegantly express game logic using F# computation expressions.

• Building Social Web Applications (by Yan Cui) is based on Yan's experience with developing backend services for Facebook games in F#. Also have a look at Yan's podcast at .NET Rocks!.

Upcoming chapters

Now, what chapters can you look forward to if you bought the MEAP release? In the next four-six weeks, we would like to release the following chapters:

• Succeeding with functional-first languages in Industry (by Don Syme & myself) will give you a broader perspective to F# and functional programming. Why and when should you use F#? And what is the F# Software Foundation?

• F# in the enterprise (by Chris Ballard) explains the compromises that F# developers need to make to succeed in the enterprise. Should you use functional style everywhere and for everything? Or should you just stick to objects?

• Test driven development in F# (by Phil Trelford) will give you answers to the question of testing F# code. You'll read about various F# testing tools like Foq.

• Trading application GUI with F# (by Dmitry Morozov). Dmitry is the author of a great F# MVC framework for WPF and this chapter will outline the key ideas you need to know!

Aside from these, we still have a few more chapters that we'd like to add to the book. There has been amazing development in the F# community recently regarding data science and machine learning, so expect some chapters from this area too. Follow this blog for more updates!