Manning: F# Deep Dives deal of the day

The F# language has been around for longer than many people suspect. My first, completely outdated, blog post was from May 2006. The Microsoft Research releases, sometime around 2006 were the first stable versions that gained some interest and slowly attracted commercial users.

A lot has changed since the early days. F# now includes powerful features like computation expressions and asynchronous workflows and F# 3.0 comes with unique type provider mechanism.

There is an increasing number of users from diverse domains: F# is used to model complex domains in finance and science; asynchronous and concurrent features are used to write server-side components of social games and trading systems, but also in web programming; the expressivity of F# is used by machine learning experts to handle dirty data or classify XBox players. Moreover, the F# Software Foundation has been recently founded to support the collaboration between different commercial users, open-source community and academia.

Upcoming book: F# Deep Dives

There is an increasing interest in F#, but many of those who approach it ask (excellent) questions such as: "In what problem domains can I benefit from F#?" or "How do I use F# in finance/science/gaming or web programming?" and most importantly "How do I approach different problems in F#?"

I think the best answer to all of these questions is to look at the existing commercial uses of F#. And that's why I paired up with Phil Trelford and Manning to edit a book containing chapters from a number of real-world users of F#. Both me and Phil are writing one or two chapters too, but the rest of the book will be written by recognized F# experts who use it in their daily work to solve real-world problems.

F# Deep Dives: Table of Content

The book consists of 5 parts that cover the most common real-world uses of F#: Developing of Analytical Components, Processing and Analyzing Data, Creating End-user Applications and F# in the Larger Context. The preliminary chapter list looks like this:

1. Succeeding with functional-first languages in Industry
2. Implementing business rule engine
3. Parsing text based languages
4. Numerical computing in financial domain
5. Analyzing and visualizing graph data
6. Integrating external data into the F# language
7. Handling dirty data with machine learning
8. Asynchronous and agent-based programming
9. Implementing a trading system
10. Functional programming in the cloud
11. Creating games using XNA
12. Building social web applications
13. F# in the enterprise
14. Test driven and behavior driven development
15. Optimizing F# code for performance
16. Appendix: The F# language crash course

From Real-World Experts

We do not have a finalized list of authors for individual chapters yet, but some of the people who agreed to contribute include Simon Cousins, Chao-Jen Chen, Keith Battocchi, Zach Bray, Johann Deneux, Yan Cui and Chris Marinos.

Summary

As I said in the introduction, there is an increasing number of commercial F# applications. If you want to learn about the domains where F# can make you more productive and help you to write correct code, or if you want to learn how F# experts approach different problems, then the upcoming F# Deep Dives book is the book for you!