What's a good beginning text on functional programming? [closed]

Solution 1:

The Little Schemer teaches recursion really well, and it's fun and simple to read.

I also liked The Scheme Programming Language for a broader introduction into the language.

Solution 2:

Try Real World Haskell. It's free online.

Solution 3:

SICP is a great book.

This is probably my bias, but I thought ocaml was pretty easy to get into. You have the option of programming in a few different styles until you're completely comfortable. I posted a bunch of links to Haskell and Ocaml references that are books, with examples et cetera that seem right up your alley.

If you prefer Lisp, you can try to power through the 99-problems in Lisp(which you can do in any language, really), or you can watch the lectures from the people who wrote SICP.

Further down the road, get a hold of "Purely Functional Data Structures", as it'll get into the hard-core deep design and considerations you have to take into account in functional languages --it uses ML (which ocaml derived from).

Solution 4:

I really recommend "On Lisp" from Paul Graham.

It is concise and very readable even for beginners in functional programming (as I was when I read it). It contains a lot of very short examples, each which helps to understand one single thing.

I often thought reading this book: this is just the language containing exactly the features I ever wanted in other (nonfunctional) languages, but never got. :-( And this is exactly the book to learn it, always comprehensible, sometimes even funny!

You may get it for free at the author's site!