How to quickly learn F#

I haven’t blogged about F# for sometime now because I am busy with my research work recently. But I nearly use F# everyday to conduct experiments. Also I attracted several of my teammates to get interested in F#, so I write the following guide for my teammates to quickly learn F#.

There are other “learning outline” pages such as the wiki page on Stackoverflow. However the following list provides a path for learning F# and hope to reduce the learning time to be as short as possible.

BTW, it is the Chinese New Year now. Wish everyone a warm Spring Festival!

 

Step 1

Before reading books/articles, watch the three videos by Luca Bolognese (former F# PM), Luke Hoban (F# PM) and Don Syme (creator of F#).

Step 2

Read the book by Chris Smith (former F# team member, now at Google): Programming F#. After reading the book, quickly scan the following two online books:

· F# Wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:F_Sharp

· The F# Survival Guide: http://www.ctocorner.com/fsharp/book/default.aspx

They basically cover the same content as Programming F#; reading them gives you a refresh of basic F#.

Step 3

Try to solve the first 50 problems at Project Euler: http://projecteuler.net/ and read the solutions at: http://fsharp-euler.wikispaces.com/ if you have difficulty. You can also search the solutions online; there are many blogs on how to solve Project Euler problems using F#. But before reading the solution, try your best and you can learn F# basics very quickly.

Step 3 alternative

You can skip step 3 (or part of it) if you have experience in building a compiler or interpreter and you are interested in programming languages. The ProgramAsData folder contains the free online book, homeworks (some F# template code is provided) and well-edited slides in the Program as Data course by Prof. Peter Sestoft.

Step 4

Read some chapters of Expert F# 2.0 by Don Syme, and use the book as a reference when you program a bigger/real-world project in F#.

[Optional] Read books like CLR via C# to know more about the .Net platform.