Email the Author
You can use this page to email Brian Marick about Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer.
About the Book
This book serves three overlapping audiences:
- People who'd like to learn functional programming because they want to be ready if such languages become part of the mainstream.
- People who'll be working in an object-oriented language but want to use some functional programming idioms and tricks of the trade in their projects.
- People with less specific goals, but who believe that learning languages that conceptualize problems and solutions in radically different ways will make them better programmers in general.
The book uses Clojure, a popular functional language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It contains many exercises and their solutions.
For more about what the book covers, see the sample PDF. It includes the Introduction, the first chapter, and the glossary.
The book is "feature complete", but there will be bug fixes and improvements to the explanations over the next few months.
Praise
"This book, written by Brian Marick, is important. Indeed, it may be necessary. We need something to bridge the gap between the huge population of OO programmers, and the growing need for functional programmers. I’ve seen nothing else that fills this need so well."
— From a review by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin
"@marick is blowing my mind with #fp_oo, building OO on top of FP."
"I have an understanding of monads for the first time thanks to @marick and his awesome book"
"'Functional Programming for the OO Programmer' by @marick features the best introduction to Clojure I've read so far."
"Bought #fp_oo by @marick today. Chapter 1 is the best #clojure intro I have read"
About the Author
Brian Marick was first exposed to the functional style in 1983, when the accident of knowing a little bit of Lisp tossed him into the job of technical lead on a project to port Common Lisp to a now-defunct computer architecture. That led him to a reading spree about all things Lisp, the language from which the functional style arguably originated. He’s been a language geek ever since, despite making most of his living as a software process consultant. He’s the author of the popular Midje testing library for Clojure and has written books (Everyday Scripting with Ruby, Programming Cocoa with Ruby, and Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer). The two books in progress are An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming and Lenses for the Mere Mortal.