Exploration Through Example

I’ve been asked for things to read after my “Functional Programming for Object-Oriented Programmers” course. Here are some, concentrating on the ones that are more fun to read and less in love with difficulty for difficulty’s sake.

If you were more interested in the Clojure/Lisp part of the course:

• The Little Schemer and other books by the same authors. These teach some deep ideas even though they start out very simply. You’ll either find the way they’re written charming or annoying.

• Land of Lisp is a strange book on Lisp.

• If you were totally fascinated by multimethods, you could try The Art of the Metaobject Protocol.

If you were more interested in the functional programming part of the course, the suggestions are harder. So much of the writing on functional programming is overly math-fetishistic.

• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is another quirky book (lots of odd drawings that have little to do with the text), but it covers many topics using the purest functional language. There’s both a paper version and a free online version. The online version has better drawings (color!).

• I haven’t read Purely Functional Data Structures, though I think I have it somewhere. @SamirTalwar tweeted to me that “I’m enjoying Purely Functional Data Structures. It’s quite mathsy, but with a practical bent.” The book is derived from the author’s PhD thesis.

The approach I took in the course was inspired by the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (free online version). Many people find the book more difficult than most of the ones above. Part of the reason is that the problems are targeted at MIT engineering students, so you get a lot of problems that involve resistors and such.