Functional Programming, Simplified (current contents)

As of October 20, 2017, the contents of my book, Functional Programming, Simplified (formerly “Learning Functional Programming in Scala”) can now be summarized like this:

• the pros and cons of functional programming
• why FP function signatures are much more important than OOP method signatures
• how pure functions work with I/O (file, database, and network)
• visual lessons on anonymous functions
• lessons on recursion, with many images to help explain how it works
• how the concepts of JVM stacks and stack frames work
• partially-applied functions and currying
• a thorough look at case classes and related topics like pattern matching
• type signatures are covered many times, so you can get used to reading code like StateT[IO,GameState,Int]
• the correct way to handle exceptions and null values
• more than a dozen lessons on for-comprehensions
• the meaning of FP terms like lambda, functor, monad, “monadic,” and algebraic data types (ADTs)
• how to use the ScalaCheck “property testing” framework
• monads like State and IO
• monad transformers like StateT
• domain modeling with Scala and functional programming
• lenses
• an introduction to type classes, including an example with the Cats library
• concurrency lessons, including Akka actors and Scala futures
• visual lessons on collections’ methods like fold and reduce

With this release the book is now available as a PDF on Gumroad, and as a Kindle eBook on Amazon.