Book Update – NEW Coauthor!

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You might be concerned about my lack of blogging, perhaps that I was lost in the woods and perhaps eaten by a bear. Well, unfortunately, all of my time has been devoted to three tasks:

I would like to give you an update on item #1 my book, as there have been some rather interesting developments. There are plenty of great books on F# being written, and book competition is a great thing. However, one F#-related book in particular has caught my attention:

 

Real World Functional Programming

By Tomas Petricek

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Tomas currently works as an intern at Microsoft Research in Cambridge on F# and is crazy-smart. (Seriously, he’s a level-9 ninja master at F#. Have you checked out F# Web Tools?)

But I’m not too worried about my book competing with his for two reasons:

  1. His book is about Functional Programming and mine is specifically about F#. So while there is some overlap, his book is about applications of functional programming while mine is about concepts and syntax.
  2. His has some creepy looking dude* and mine will (hopefully) have a fire-breathing Hydra on the cover.

For a time I wasn’t worried about Tomas’ book. Until now…

It was recently announced that Manning was adding a co-author to Tomas’ book; none other than Jon Skeet himself. Make no mistake, Jon is not some mortal programmer. Rather, his brain contains 63.8% of all knowledge on StackOverflow.

So Real World Functional Programming not only has one great authoring. But now it has two. So really, any other book on F# or functional programming is simply hosed. No point in publishing it – Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet are teaming up to write a book on functional programming. Save your time and go home.

I don’t mind the challenge of competing with this book, but it certainly raises the stakes.

I’ve been making a few phone calls to Tim O’Reilly and Laurel Ruma about what we can do about this. It took a while to get layers to figure things out, but now I have a new coauthor of my own for Programming F# :

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That’s right. CHUCK NORRIS has agreed to not only write the forward, but help coauthor the book to!

Chuck and I are still working out who will own which chapters, but I’ve been able to get an advanced copy of his forward to the book.

Dear Reader,

The fact you are sitting here reading this forward means that you weren’t already killed by the Russians. You have me and me alone to thank for that.

In this book Chris Smith and I will teach you how to roundhouse kick concurrency issues, use an M16 to mow down mutation-related bugs, and how to divide by zero. (I’ve been doing it for years, and trust me – it’s worth it.)

…

While I am very excited to have Chuck onboard, reading the page on Jon Skeet Facts has me worried.

  • Jon Skeet is immutable. If something's going to change, it's going to have to be the rest of the universe.
  • The Dining Philosophers wait while Jon Skeet eats.
  • Jon Skeet can recite π. Backwards.
  • When Jon gives a method an argument, the method loses
  • When Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed
  • When invoking one of Jon's callbacks, the runtime adds "please"

It may be a tough call as for which book turns out better, but I can’t wait to see the results! In related news, Chapters 1-4 of Programming F# are available on Rough Cuts with another couple on the way. So stay tuned!

*Rumor has it that, the “creepy looking dude” on the cover of Real World Functional Programming is Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard [pic]… but does he breath fire?