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 shoud 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 (...).

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...

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 My first, completely outdated, blog post was from May 2006.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.

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#?"

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