Functional Programming Patterns in Scala and Clojure: Write Lean Programs for the JVM

I like the approach of this book in that it uses a simple web server as its primary example. I find this very meaningful for my work, as much of my work has a networking component. I also like how it starts off with an imperative piece of code that is very similar to the way I, as an imperative programmer of many years, might have done it myself. The authors then take the problem apart from a functional perspective.I think it is very important to avoid leading readers using only examples which are easily handled with a functional approach. This book achieves this with challenging material. I was surprised that I could not simply read the book and gain a rapid understanding, but had to go and really do the exercises with the author. I am told by a number of experts that this is typical for imperative-minded programmers. But I really want to learn functional programming, so I'm glad I purchased this book!

Can't believe I paid almost $20 for this. The explanations are repetitive and written in a very boring prose. The code examples are hugely oversimplified, and are neither practical nor interesting. Anyone with a half-decent understanding of these patterns could have thought them up, and most could probably do better. The Scala code is often not idiomatic (e.g. using Vectors instead of lists, constructed without the :: constructor). I can't speak for the Clojure, I'm not as familiar with the language.For one of the more interesting patterns, Memoization, after showing a completely naïve Scala implementation that ignores generics doesn't even try to demonstrate how to correctly use the type system, and instead just hard-codes the specific types being used in the example, I was really curious about what the Clojure code would look like. Instead, he just says there's a standard function to do it. I'm glad it was mentioned, but I would expect a $20 book would at least compare implementations.I've read blogs that are more in-depth, better-written, and have more useful code examples than this drivel. Don't buy.

The book highlights why the whole pattern thing happened. Each pattern illustrates a problem with Java's ability to abstract. Basically Java can abstract nouns easily, verbs are harder, hence the patterns. The book illustrates how most other programming languages easily abstract a given case that is difficult in Java. My summary is this is a book illustrates the reasons why you shouldn't use Java (or C# for that matter) in your projects. Just use Clojure (or a good lisp) or Scala if you hate lisp or Python, or any other language rather than Java.

This is not functional programming book. This book is written for developers that be used to object-oriented programming and interested in functional programming. The first half is rewriting object-oriented design pattern by functional idioms but it's not functional style programming. The last half is about functional programming techniques(i.e. tail recursion, lazy sequence). If you want to learn functional style programming, I couldn't recommend it. You should read another great books like "Scala for the impatient", "Functional programming in scala", "The Joy of Clojure" and so on.

If you are a complete newbie in FP you might get "something" out of this book. However, the book has many errors and the highlight of that is the cake pattern. At the end he finishes that discussion with "However, this will get us another compiler error...", without clarifying what the next step is. I believe this book approaches the functional programming in a wrong (and simplistic) way.

A nice complement to the classic Odersky tome. Well edited and easy to understand.Helps people with an extensive OO background move into the functional realm, which I think is much more challenging that learning new language syntax.Examples are well-chosen and highlight very useful language features, simultaneously helping one move from OO to functional.

This books if great for anyone with OO background and covers how to apply the OO patterns everybody loves :) in functional fasion. However, when you do functional programming those patterns will be very natural to you.Functional patterns part is also great. It covers lazy evaluation, mutual recurcion and many others.You will not find avdanced Scala techniques in this book, but again, very good read for somewhat familiar with Scala syntax and willing to learn how to actally apply functional style patterns in their everyday programming.

I found this book really helpful. Especially when trying to understand more about the many ways I could use functional programming to solve many day-to-day problems. Functional patterns really make OO patterns look trivial and code-wasting. This book actually shows you the code, and makes you get why declarative and functional is the way to go.You won't regret it, it's worth much more than I payed for.

Could be better written - the meaning of some sentences were ambiguous due to poor punctuation and syntax!IT is an interesting subject but was spoiled by the book being too short and not describing the concepts well enough. Examples not very good as they lack real-world relevence. It would have been so much better if the patterns were linked with code that made a real working application covering the whole spectrum of patterns available.