It has been a long time since I got excited about a programming book as much as I did with Programming F#. I have all the books on F# available in the market today. But I should say that this is the best book for learning F# if you have no experience with functional programming. I am not sure how this book would be for a person who is totally new to programming (chances are they would find this ahead of their curve). But for a person who has good experience with imperative programming this book would get you up and running with F# in specific and functional programming in general.

The book by Don Syme Expert F# (Expert’s Voice in .Net) (who invented F#) is also good but not as good as Programming F# for new functional programmers. But once you have read this book, Don Syme’s book might be a good follow up.

The strongest point of this book is the clarity with which concepts are explained and the choice of good examples to explain a concept. They are concise and to the point. It also made the book surprisingly small (at a little less than 400 pages). But no worries, everything that you need to get a firm footing in F# is in here.

This is truly a 5 star book. Highly recommended.

The table of contents:
Part I. Multiparadigm Programming

Chapter 1. Introduction to F#
Chapter 2. Fundamentals
Chapter 3. Functional Programming
Chapter 4. Imperative Programming
Chapter 5. Object-Oriented Programming
Chapter 6. .NET Programming
Chapter 7. Applied Functional Programming
Chapter 8. Applied Object-Oriented Programming

Part II. Programming F#

Chapter 9. Scripting
Chapter 10. Computation Expressions
Chapter 11. Asynchronous and Parallel Programming
Chapter 12. Reflection
Chapter 13. Quotations
Appendix A. Overview of .NET Libraries
Appendix B. F# Interop