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The Happy Lambda

Functional Programming in Ruby

IMPORTANT: As more time passes it's increasingly unlikely I'll ever get to finish this book. I'm leaving it on-line since there's still some good content that's already there. If you like what's already there then please consider supporting me on https://www.patreon.com/plexus

I have started a business creating screencasts about Clojure, and that is consuming 150% of my available time. You can check it out at https://lambdaisland.com

Learn all about functional programming in the context of your favorite programming language. Get inspired, expand your thinking and become a better programmer in the process.

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About

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Author

About the Author

Arne Brasseur

Arne is a developer, public speaker, programming coach and open-source contributor. With a passion for both human and programming languages, he has spent the last decade teaching and exploring the finer points of Ruby, LISP, Haskell, Mandarin Chinese, and others.

When not hopping conferences or Pacific islands, he can be found at his home base in Berlin, brewing fine teas while pondering the future of open-source and the web.

Contents

Table of Contents

  • 1. Publish early, publish often
    • 1.1 Changelog
  • 2. Introduction
    • 2.1 Evocation
  • 3. Functional Programming
    • 3.1 What vs how
    • 3.2 Functions as first class citizens
    • 3.3 Higher Order Functions
    • 3.4 Lack of mutable state
    • 3.5 Pure functions
    • 3.6 Strict and Lazy Evaluation
    • 3.7 Pros and Cons
  • 4. Building blocks
    • 4.1 Methods and Functions
    • 4.2 Iterators, Enumerables and Enumerators
    • 4.3 Lambdas / procs / blocks
    • 4.4 Lazy enumerators (to be written)
  • 5. Patterns
    • 5.1 Value Object
    • 5.2 Function Object (to be written)
    • 5.3 Functional Core, Imperative Shell (to be written)
    • 5.4 Collections
  • 6. Making Ruby More Functional
    • 6.1 Block and Lambda Arguments
    • 6.2 Converting to Proc
    • 6.3 Dropping the Ampersands
    • 6.4 Function Composition
  • 7. Runtime support
    • 7.1 Applicative vs Lazy evaluation (to be written)
    • 7.2 Frozen (string) literals (to be written)
    • 7.3 Tail recursion / tail call optimization (to be written)
    • 7.4 Garbage Collection (to be written)
  • 8. Glossary

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