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Learn Functional Programming The Fast Way!: A former Java/OOP instructor teaches FP in the fastest way he knows
Hi, this is Alvin Alexander, the author of this book. I’ve reduced the book’s price so that my royalty is just over $6 (USD). I’m doing this because I firmly believe that this book is by far the easiest way I know to get started with functional programming (FP). As a result, I want to make this book as inexpensive as possible so everyone can learn about the benefits of FP.
From OOP to FP, The Easy Way
Would you like to be able to learn what the excitement is about FP, without having to learn the abstract concepts in category theory?
And would you like to understand world-class FP libraries like ZIO and Cats Effect that power high-performance, massively-parallel websites like Caesars and Disney Streaming?
To get you started in that direction, this small, easy to read book from the Scala/FP community’s leading author has one When you finish the book you should be able to look at the documentation for the ZIO and Cats Effect websites and think, “Aha, I know WHAT they’re doing, and WHY they’re doing it.” This book takes you to the cusp of using those FP libraries, and once you have this foundational knowledge, everything else in FP is just a matter of learning the details of each library.
The Approach
Alvin Alexander “discovered” this teaching technique while he was writing the 2nd Edition of the Scala Cookbook . Thanks to the new approaches in the ZIO library — which were released at that time — he found that if you really learn the Option, Try, and Either data types, they naturally lead to the ‘IO’ data type you hear about in the FP world.
A HUGE benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to spend time learning category theory, monoids, functors, monads, etc. Instead, you just focus on pragmatic knowledge and writing code. Each small lesson is four pages on average, and each one adds a new piece of knowledge, until at the end of the book you’re writing FP code using ZIO. If you go right from the book to the ZIO 2 documentation you should know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
(And if you still want to learn category theory at this point, you’re more than welcome to.)
About the Author
Alvin Alexander is the author Alvin writes in a simple, conversational style, as though he’s sitting next to you in a pair programming session, or mentoring you in a small classroom.
Written for OOP Developers
If you’re an OOP developer who uses programming languages like Java or Kotlin, Alvin understands your background. Alvin is a former Java/OOP instructor and mentor, and uses Kotlin for Android apps, and Flutter/Dart for iOS/Android apps. (He has also used Python, Swift, Rust, Ruby, and other languages.)
The Book’s Path
The book starts with a discussion of the Java/OOP code Alvin wrote for 15 years. He then shows how to solve programming problems using these After comparing this code to his previous Java/OOP code, it’s off to the races as he adds After that, he shows how these techniques naturally lead to the concepts found in the ZIO and Cats Effect libraries. As Alvin writes in Functional Programming, Simplified , if you had been interested in these techniques many years ago, you might have invented FP yourself.
From OOP to FP, The Easy Way
Would you like to be able to learn what the excitement is about FP, without having to learn the abstract concepts in category theory?
And would you like to understand world-class FP libraries like ZIO and Cats Effect that power high-performance, massively-parallel websites like Caesars and Disney Streaming?
To get you started in that direction, this small, easy to read book from the Scala/FP community’s leading author has one When you finish the book you should be able to look at the documentation for the ZIO and Cats Effect websites and think, “Aha, I know WHAT they’re doing, and WHY they’re doing it.” This book takes you to the cusp of using those FP libraries, and once you have this foundational knowledge, everything else in FP is just a matter of learning the details of each library.
The Approach
Alvin Alexander “discovered” this teaching technique while he was writing the 2nd Edition of the Scala Cookbook . Thanks to the new approaches in the ZIO library — which were released at that time — he found that if you really learn the Option, Try, and Either data types, they naturally lead to the ‘IO’ data type you hear about in the FP world.
A HUGE benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to spend time learning category theory, monoids, functors, monads, etc. Instead, you just focus on pragmatic knowledge and writing code. Each small lesson is four pages on average, and each one adds a new piece of knowledge, until at the end of the book you’re writing FP code using ZIO. If you go right from the book to the ZIO 2 documentation you should know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
(And if you still want to learn category theory at this point, you’re more than welcome to.)
About the Author
Alvin Alexander is the author Alvin writes in a simple, conversational style, as though he’s sitting next to you in a pair programming session, or mentoring you in a small classroom.
Written for OOP Developers
If you’re an OOP developer who uses programming languages like Java or Kotlin, Alvin understands your background. Alvin is a former Java/OOP instructor and mentor, and uses Kotlin for Android apps, and Flutter/Dart for iOS/Android apps. (He has also used Python, Swift, Rust, Ruby, and other languages.)
The Book’s Path
The book starts with a discussion of the Java/OOP code Alvin wrote for 15 years. He then shows how to solve programming problems using these After comparing this code to his previous Java/OOP code, it’s off to the races as he adds After that, he shows how these techniques naturally lead to the concepts found in the ZIO and Cats Effect libraries. As Alvin writes in Functional Programming, Simplified , if you had been interested in these techniques many years ago, you might have invented FP yourself.
250 pages, Paperback
Published March 31, 2023
1 person want to read
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