Want To Start With Functional Programming? This Is The Book You Should Read For A Smooth Entry, Clear Design, And Better Code In General

I’m currently reading Grokking Simplicity by Eric Normand.

And I’m.. not blown away by how much I enjoy reading it.

For really capturing my attention, the book moves to slow.

But that is a good thing. I’m no beginner anymore: I’ve been thinking about Functional Programming ever since I learned Haskell in 2018, learned a bunch of functional programming languages, and worked in several larger codebases. So it’s probably time I start to feel what it’s like to be an expert. To be perfectly tuned for me, the book would have to move faster.

But it doesn’t.

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So far, Grokking Simplicity is just great.

It’s well written and really avoids jargon. On top of that, Eric Normand decided to reimplement functional programming’s features in JavaScript. This has two benefits: People know JS, or are at least used to its C-like syntax, and it enables Eric to build them from the ground up.

In every chapter so far, it either changed my thinking or gave me new language/examples/mental models to talk and think about the issue(s) it describes.

That’s what I like about a book. So recommended.