Web, Cloud and Mobile solutions with F# - book review.
Published on Dec 21, 2012Disclaimer: I got this book as part of the bloggers review program at O’Reilly.
Daniel Mohl’s book had the distinctive quality to make F# really approachable.
Some of those F# characteristics are: functional / OO paradigm, messaging, records and immutability.
I think that the secret lies in the approach the author took in showing us how we can use F# and it’s distinct capabilities to write better solutions in a world where high availability and scale is a major concern.
There are multiple examples on writing services with different technologies, not just Microsoft products but also open source frameworks. You will learn about a number of F# libraries that will make your life easier in a day to day use in real world projects.
The author makes an effort to show different ways to solve similar problems, ex: using records and classes to interact with databases and queues, while at the same time indicating what is the preferred way in F#.
Some of my favorite sections of the book: Using NancyFX and WebApi with F# to create HTTP services. Interacting with Azure services and how to combine F# with NoSQL databases like Mongo, Raven and CouchDB.
There is also a really good example on using Web Sockets with a library called Fleck that I wasn’t familiar with.
Conclusion
I found the book a really enjoyable read and the reason to try to use F# soon in some side project.
I feel that makes F# very approachable and is really good on showing why you should care. It’s not just another language, or a language that should be used only when doing lots of data processing or scientific work, but a tool that can help even when dealing more pedestrian, but still complex, tasks.