I’ve been tinkering off and on with F# for about two years. Now I plan to dive in and do some serious code writing, so I’m gathering all my resources in one place (here) ready to move forward. For anyone with a beginning to intermediate level of experience with F#, this is my recommended course of study.
Development Environment
If you plan to write F# in Mono I can’t help you setting up the environment, but now is a great time to get started with F# using Visual Studio 11 beta because it includes the upcoming F# 3.0, and the Intellisense for F# is better than ever in the beta. F# 3.0 includes the much anticipated Type Providers and F# LINQ queries against Type Providers data sources. Type Providers auto-magically provide strongly typed data structures from diverse sources at design time, meaning the data schema is available to you in Intellisense. Wow! Type Providers are available fora growing number of data providers1, and if you can’t find the Type Provider you need, write your own.
You’ll want to install a couple VS extensions.
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F# Outlining let’s you collapse sections of F# code, pretty much like you already can with C# in Visual Studio.
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I also recommend getting both the MsTest Project Template and FsUnit from Daniel Mohl. The template will get you started a little faster on unit tests, and FsUnit will make your unit tests more composable, a little more in tune with how you (hopefully) write the rest of your F# code (i.e. in a functional manner).
Core Course
All you need to learn F# is the Wikibook F# Programming and the MSDN Visual F# references pages, most notably the F# Language Reference and F# Core Library Reference.
So open up VS11 beta and the MSDN reference pages and work through each chapter of F# Programming. It covers every topic of the language you need to know (with the possible exception of Code Quotations and Type Providers). This course is complete and easy to follow. I still use it as a reference.
You’ll also want to use the F# REPL, fsi, while writing code, or while studying code someone else has written. You have a lot of choices here. There’s a fsi window built into Visual Studio, or you can run it from the command line or PowerShell. There are at least two versions available on web pages, Try F# and Try Joinads. There’s even a Try F# iOS app.
You’ll find you have to deliberately write F# one statement at a time. Of course that’s literally true for other languages you’ve worked in, but especially while first learning you will find it challenging to get the syntax perfect as you attempt writing more sophisticated statements (and it has to be perfect). So take advantage of Intellisense in the Visual Studio code window, and fsi for syntax debugging until the statement builds correctly. If everything does not build in the VS code window (with the exception of the incomplete statement you are currently writing), Intellisense is not available . This is why you have to make sure each statement builds as you write it. But here’s your reward: if your statement builds (and you are coding in a purely functional style) it probably works as you intend. More time up-front thinking through what you are doing, and less time typing.
Beyond the Basics
Once you finish Awesome Princess’ excellent course, you’ll want to continue your graduate studies along with whatever productive coding you are doing. Studying the code others have published is a good place to start. F# Snippets is a repository of open source F# snippets that do all sorts of things created by anyone who cares to post. Hat tip to Tomas Petricek for creating this great site and the technology behind it. You know what’s really cool? Mouse over the code in any snippet on the site and you get Intellisense tool tips!
And then there are the bloggers. So many smart folks writing great articles on the why’s and how to’s of F# in particular and functional programming in general. Don Syme’s WebLog on F# and Related Topics deserves special mention, as he is the designer and architect of the F# programming language. Here’s a few others I’ve found useful (and I know there are many others). In some cases I link directly to the author’s F# tagged articles.
Bug squash, Mauricio Scheffer’s blog
Clear Lines, Mathias Brandewinder’s blog
Random Ravings of a Red Headed Code Monkey, Daniel Mohl’s blog
Rash thoughts about .NET, C#, F# and Dynamics NAV, Steffen Forkmann’s blog
Faisal’s space, can’t find Faisal’s last name
Intellifactory Blog, creators of WebSharper
F# and Data Mining, Yin Zhu’s blog
Chris Smith’s completely unique view and then continued at a Chris Smith on Software, but apparently Chris hasn’t blogged about F# since 2010
Simon Cousins: almost functioning, Simon Tyler Cousins’ blog
MOIRAE Software Engineering Ltd, a software engineering company based in the north east of England
F# News, Jon Harrop’s blog
Matthew Podwysocki, can’t seem to filter on just F#
Inside F#, can’t find Brian’s last name
Geez this is getting kind of long.
Here’s the F# open-source community on GitHub. Any of these folks I missed probably have F# blogs too.
…and last, but not least
FPish – Online community of functional developers, more than a blog…
Theory Matters
Start getting used to the arrow notation F# uses to describe function signatures. This is a big deal. Function signatures are going to be constantly in your face, and sometimes subtly lurking in the background through everything you do in F#. So pay attention to them from the beginning. With a little effort you will get good at understanding them.
Once you complete the course, read a few articles, and write some functional code, you start realizing how different functional programming is from the old familiar imperative style. And you will probably run across articles that get pretty deep in the theoretical weeds. Inevitably you will read the term “monad”, and you probably won’t understand what the heck the article is about. I spent a long time reading and rereading articles about monads, studying code implementing monads, and I still didn’t get it.
Finally I found a concise, understandable description of monads. Here’s another article that is a little longer, a little more abstract, but still comprehensible. And finally you may find the Wikipedia article useful (after you start to catch-on). Some people might find an explanation illustrated in C# useful.
Don’t try to force-feed yourself on monads. You can get a lot done (even with monads) without fully understanding them.
Thankfully the helpful fellows on the FSharpx team have implemented a number of the most common monads, and a bunch of other basic F# functional constructs in their useful .NET library. It’s well worth the effort to download the source code and study it. While you are studying the monad code in FSharpX keep handy this set of Matthew Podwysocki articles:
Much Ado About Monads – State Edition
Much Ado About Monads – Reader Edition
Much Ado About Monads – List Edition
Much Ado About Monads – Maybe Edition
Much Ado About Monads – Creating Extended Builders
Much Ado About Monads – Creating Extended Builders Part II
OK, enough of monads. I’m going to throw one more series of articles at you. Monads is not a prerequisite, in fact skip monads altogether and read this series. It gets to the heart of a broad area of functional programming, specifically using F#.
Purely functional data structures are an important part of functional programming. Chris Okasaki popularized this subject with his ground-breaking PhD thesis, and the expansion of his thesis into the book (adding more structures that weren’t part of his original research). F# programmers are fortunate that many, if not all, of the structures in Chris’ book have been implemented in F# (don’t forget to click “Older Entries” at the bottom of the page, there are two pages of headings). Hat tip to Steffen Forkmann for bringing this to my notice. Whoever Julien is, he needs to stand up and take a bow.
Had Enough?
If not, then Try Joinads, Tomas Petricek’s excursion into a F# research extension for concurrent, parallel and asynchronous programming. I think his work on joinads is really valuable, and I hope Microsoft soon incorporates it into a F# 3.1 release, but for now it requires a hacked version of the open source F# compiler, and supposedly breaks Intellisense.
Notes
[1] F#3.0 comes with a handful of built-in type providers and FSharpX provides more. At a minimum you should find Type Providers for OData services, SQL schemas and connections, WSDL web services, resource files, regex, file system, csv, Excel, JSON, XML, Registry, XAML, and App Settings.