A step by step introduction to some basic concepts of functional programming like higher order functions (passing a function to a method), pure functions (for the same input always return the same output without side effects), immutable variables, recursion and lazy evaluation.
The first chapters are in Java but starting from chapter 4 the book switches to Groovy and the latest chapters are in Scala. The Java code is not very complicated and is probably understandable for anyone with knowledge of statically typed object-oriented programming languages. Note that all Java samples use Java 7 which is rather verbose for functional programming which is one of the reasons the book switches to Groovy and Scala. The other reason is off course is that these languages support functional concepts out of the box.
Content wise the books starts with an introduction to functional programming then makes the transition from first-class functions to higher order functions and pure functions. Next are immutable variables and recursion, with a nice introduction to tail recursion. Followed by small side steps to laziness and statements. To conclude with pattern matching functional object-oriented programming. The last chapter is surprisingly as it first gives advice on transitioning into functional programming then talks about new design patterns and ends with a full implementation of a simplistic database in Scala.
It's not a bad book in the sense that it teaches incorrect material but it's not a very good book neither. It's a book written for Java developers that have never heard of the basic concepts of functional programming but personally I prefer a different approach to achieve this goal. Instead of refactoring code from the imperative style into the functional style and along the way introducing concepts, I think it's faster and easier to learn functional programming by clearly explaining and showing the concepts directly. Only then you should elaborate on how to migrate from the original code to the functional style and explain why this is a good thing to do. Although it's a rather short book (an estimated 140 pages) it is not very dense but it gives semi-real world example based on requirements from a fictional company XXY. Only the most common functional programming concepts are introduced.
My advice is to buy this book if you're a Java developer who has no experience in functional programming.
Otherwise I would skip this book and instead read:
- Real World Functional Programming: examples in C# (which is a better version of Java, at least for functional programming) and F# (programming language from the ML-family)
- Functional Programming in JavaScript
- or any book on Erlang, Haskell, Clojure (e.g. Joy of Clojure), Common Lisp, F#, OCaml, Scala, ...
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