What this book covers
Chapter 1, Embrace the Truth, explains F#'s rather special role in the functional programming world. You will also discuss F#'s roots in ML, the context in which F# works, that is, running on top of .NET stack, compiled to IL, utilizing BCL and the hybrid nature of the languages.
Chapter 2, Now Lazily Get Over It, Again, will prepare you to delve into the intermediate F# concepts which you are going to utilize later. It will help you in setting up the Visual Studio .NET and F# Compiler to work together along with the environment and runtime, review how to run your F# programs in IDE and through interactive REPL shell, implement the Fibonacci sequence and Tower of Hanoi using recursion, and apply lazy evaluation for quick sort.
Chapter 3, What's in the Bag Anyway?, will provide insights about the built-in data structures—array, list, set, and map, and will present their typical use cases.
Chapter 4, Are We There Yet?, delves into sequence expression (seq), implementation of custom enumeration for purpose of sequence expression (that is, paging functionality), and application of simple custom types using records, tuples.
Chapter 5, Let's Stack Up, will help you build a basic ADT of a stack using F#, implement the fundamental operations, and proceed to make a concurrent version of a stack. You will also learn how to do unit testing in C# for an F# program and implement the same test method in F#.
Chapter 6, See the Forest for the Trees, will explain graph related algorithms, and teach you the implementation of your own trees. You will also learn to tackle tree searching and various other traversal techniques.
Chapter 7, Jumping the Queue, discusses the custom functional implementation of a queue. You will then be introduced to the FSharpX open source collection of functional data structures. Finally, you will explore the F# agent of MailboxProcessor, for creating async work flows, throttling, and post-processing of the results of asynchronous calls as an example usage of a queue.
Chapter 8, Quick Boost with Graph, will briefly discuss how a graph can be implemented in a functional language, and why it is a rather difficult task to undertake. You will then discover some commonly used graph implementations and explore one of the most typical shortest path graph implementation, Dijkstra.
Chapter 9, Sets, Maps, and Vectors of Indirections, reviews sets and maps, and explores a custom implementation of a vector. Additionally, you are going to discuss Intermediate Language and how it works in the .NET ecosystem.
Chapter 10, Where to Go Next?, is a reference chapter in which you can acquaint yourself with the detailed list of different resources around the functional eco-system, and the F# programming language. You will also find various guides, source code and links, which will assist you in getting additional information you will need to polish your knowledge about F#.
