This morning there was an unexpected knock at the door and a courier arrived with a large package. I was quite surprised as hadn’t ordered anything. It turned out that it was my box of author copies of “Beginning F#”. So I’m happy to announce that “Beginning F#” is finally here and if you’ve pre-ordered it will be with you shortly.
“Beginning F#” is the updated version of “Foundation of F#”, it shares very much the same structure but I has been completely updated for the VS 2010 release of F#. I’ve also added an extra chapter on parallel programming as with the addition of “Asynchronous Workflows” to F# and “Parallel Fx” to the .NET framework itself I believe F# has a lot more to offer in this area that it did when “Foundation of F#” was release. I’ve also split the chapter on Language Oriented Programming into too chapters, one on Language Oriented Programming itself and the other on parsing text. This reflects my belief that combinator libraries are the most important part of Language Oriented Programming. Other than 3 chapter, the one that introduces functional programming, has been heavily rewritten and is now much more organized. I also believe the organization of the book as whole has been improved as has the quality of the code in the examples. All the examples can be downloaded from codeplex, so there’s no need to type them out!
Here’s a picture of me clutching it proudly:
I’ve also decided to experiment with selling direct so if you’d like a copy you can buy it on ebay here. Just 10 copies available, for now, but maybe more will follow. Can’t promise the same delivery speed as amazon but I will write a dedication if you want.