Now 
in Print

Advanced Functional Programming with Elixir

Now in print

Pre-order on Amazon, or get it now at Bookshop.org (US only)

Dave's notes…

"But Elixir is already a functional programming language," was my first reaction when the proposal for this book came in. And in a way it is.

But functional programming is more than just immutability and first-class functions. It's about abstraction, and it's about being able to compose those abstractions, safely and naturally.

In languages such as Haskell, the core libraries pretty much force you to think that way. It requires a change in perspective when you come from other paradigms, but once mastered you find that your programming becomes both more expressive and more reliable.

Joseph decided to empower Elixir programmers by giving them Funx, a library that implements the key abstractions of advanced functional programming.

But the book is much more than a description of the library. It tells the story of implementing the software for an amusement park. Along the way, you'll use increasing levels of abstraction, each building on the last. You'll start with the most basic abstraction of all, identity, and discover why it can be good to have different versions of identity in direct circumstances. You'll then move through equality, ordering, predicates, monoids, and the inevitable arrival at monads.

Here you'll find this book is different: there's no talk of endofunctors or category theory. Instead, Joseph creates monads as a simple response to a coding need. I found this to be the best introduction to monads I've read.

After we have a working monad implementation, we move on to the higher order abstractions: reader, maybe, either, and effect. And this is where you'll see the real benefit of the work so far. This is where we can seamlessly combine ideas into complex, compound, and type-safe higher level functions: things that just work.

And, just to make sure you really understand, each chapter has exercises, with worked answers in an appendix.

Maybe it's time to move from functions to functional.

Advanced Functional Programming with Elixir

Now in print

Pre-order on Amazon, or get it now at Bookshop.org (US only)

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