Books and interactive tutorials
The following are some of the free available online tutorials on F#. These tutorials are excellent resources to learn about different features of the F# programming language in an organized manner. Example coding snippets and interactive lessons (Try F#) allow a hobbyist to start experimenting with F# right away, without any lengthy installs. The first functional exposure is always free.
Try F#
If you want to experiment with F# with no commitments, this is the place to go to http://www.tryfsharp.org/. This is a real learning gem published by Microsoft Research. It helps not only with the F# language itself, but with nice, powerful, interactive, step-by-step code examples from financial, scientific and numerical, statistical, data science, and charting applications. It's also a good source for broad, simple code examples.
The Try F# website provides an interactive environment in the browser to explore. It is cross-platform (and cross-browser) compatible and contains...