October 2012
Beginner
471 pages
10h 50m
English
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Chapter 7. Applied Functional Programming
Most of the programming you have done so far has been in the functional style. Although this has enabled you to write succinct, powerful programs, you never quite used the functional style to its full potential. Functional programming means more than just treating functions as values. Embracing the functional programming paradigm and having it help shape your thought process will enable you to write programs that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult in an imperative style.
In this chapter, we build on what you learned about functional
programming back in Chapter 3, and introduce
new language features that help you to be more productive in the functional
style. For example, using active patterns allows you to increase the power
of your pattern matching and eliminate the need for when guards, and by creating auto-opened modules,
you can extend common F# modules.
In addition, we look at some of the more mind-bending aspects of functional programming. You will learn how to use advanced forms of recursion to avoid stack overflows and write more efficient programs using lists. We also take a look at some common design patterns and data structures for functional code.
To begin, let’s look at how to take pattern matching from “switch statements on steroids” to an entirely new level.
Active Patterns
Pattern matching adds power to your programming by giving you a way to be
much more expressive in code branching than using if expressions alone. It ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.