Best is to go with mix of both books for better crisp understanding...
I started with Foundations of F# , read its beginning chapters and then Expert F#'s chapter focusing on Functional aspects of language....
This way i grasped the concepts more better...
Both books are excellent...
This way suited to me a bit better...but starting only with Foundations of F# will also be nice..

F# is cool..

By on 2/29/2008 11:43 PM ()

Thanks for the input, guys! I'll start with Robert's book and probably get Don Syme's too a bit later.

The Harrop book seems a bit more specialized for the Matlabish sort of things, but I'll try to get the Chalmers (the Haskell stronghold where I live) library to buy it.

By on 3/1/2008 3:21 AM ()

Foundations of F# + Expert F# + .NET Framework 2.0 :-)

I do feel that Foundations of F# provides a gentler introduction to the language. However, Expert F# contains information that isn't in Foundations of F# (e.g. Active Patterns, Asynchronous Workflows). However, both books do suffer a little from having to cover so many topics. It'd be great if there were niche books for F# as there are for more popular programming languages, but there isn't.

I included .NET Framework 2.0 to the list (even though its code examples are in C#), because I'm not sure that either book really has good converage on .NET as a whole. Both F# books are burdened with presenting the language and introducing varied readers to the ideas of functional programming. However, Joe Duffy's .NET Framework 2.0 is a very good treatment of both the runtime and the libraries .NET Framework. .NET is a very big place and F# makes it even larger. :-) Another good chooice might be CLR via C#.

Finally, an excellent place to gather information is the blogosphere. There are several F# bloggers out there (Robert included) that are writing excellent posts.

By on 2/29/2008 6:00 AM ()

Considering you are not new to .NET, I think you should go with Robert's book first. Not only it explains the language features of F#, but also it covers almost all aspects of .NET for different application domains. Then after you could switch to Expert F#, to learn different techniques to apply for different domains.

By on 2/29/2008 3:07 AM ()

You should probably know that there are 3 F# books, you missed out "F# for Scientists" by Jon Harrop, and that all of the authors read this site, so of course I would say start with the Pickering one ;)

I guess Expert F# is more aimed at people who already have experince in functional languages, where as Foundations of F# is more aimed at people coming form a C# .NET background. Having said that the pace of Expert F# is very fast so if you have no experince in ML style programing or .NET then it wouldn't hurt you to read Founations of F# first then Expert F# - both are very good. I'm sure F# for Scientists is great if your doing any kind of scientific computational work, but I haven't read it yet.

Cheers,
Rob

By on 2/29/2008 3:07 AM ()
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