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Functional Thinking: Paradigm Over Syntax

 
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Author/s    : Neal Ford
Publisher   : O'Reilly Media
Category   : Advanced Java
Review by : Tim Cooke
Rating        : 8 horseshoes

The purpose of Functional Thinking is to help intermediate to advanced programmers familiar with imperative programming to start thinking in a more 'functional' way. At 157 pages it's not a big book, which is not a criticism. I am encouraged to get stuck in knowing that it's unlikely to be a hard slog.

The chapters are cleverly laid out to take you through the shift in mindset as you progress through the book. From "Why": usual intro stuff, to "Shift": where Ford runs through the fundamental building blocks presenting some problems solved in Java, Scala, Groovy, and Clojure, to "Cede": giving up control of low-level machinery to the runtime freeing you to work on more relevant problems, to "Smarter, not Harder": presenting language features that solve common problems such as caching and lazy loading.

The book extensively uses Java8, Scala, Groovy, and Clojure for the examples. It turns out the languages are not consistent in their naming of the core constructs so it was incredibly useful to link the concepts to the different implementations. A good smattering of examples using the Functional Java library for pre-Java8 JDK's will be a welcome addition to developers keen to start using the tools but stuck on old JDK versions.

The last part of the book gives a run through of the new functional language support in Java8 and concludes with a discussion the polygot world where developers work with imperative and functional paradigms together.

As a Java developer I found this a good introduction to Functional Programming and found the level of abstraction just right for me to get a handle on the concepts without getting lost in code. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of code, but its for example rather than explanation.


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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for reviewing this book on behalf of CodeRanch.

More info at Amazon.com
 
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