Initial thoughts about next book?

[Anne Epstein]

I know, I know, it's a little early to think about our next book, but
not *that* early-a month from this week will be our final Implementing
Lean book club discussion (isn't that exciting?), and September would
leave us with just Domain Driven design. I think many of us have
enjoyed alternating between DDD and another book, so I suggest we
continue this, at least so long as we're working through DDD.

We discussed next book ideas briefly at the end of yesterday's
meeting, and decided to throw out to the group the idea of a
language-focused book next-perhaps something that we're not that
familiar with/not using regularly, and would be *different*, like
Erlang, or Haskell for instance, though it could be any number of
languages. What do you all think? And if you like the idea, got any
books that might be interesting and have enough material to spur
interesting discussions? Maybe something that spends time to convey
the mindset behind the language along with explaining the language
itself (a Learn X in 48hrs book would probably not be very good for
instance) It also was brought up that investigating some sort of
screen-sharing tool might be useful for illustrating code snippets we
experimented with, etc if we did decide to read this kind of book.

Anyway, there's no rush on a decision, but wanted to get some
discussion going on what to try to read next. We can certainly go in
a different direction than a lang book, so if you're thinking
something else, throw that out to the crowd as well-I think we were
initially taken with this idea because it's completely different from
what we've read so far, but if you've got something else that the
group might be interested in, we want to hear it!

Hoping to hear what you think, this is your book club! (and yours, and
yours... and mine too, and yours....)

[bluehavana]

Definitely like the idea of a paradigm focused book centered around a
language. The managerial/concept based books can get stuffy
sometimes. Functional sounds great; been eyeing Erlang, Scala,
Clojure, and Haskel and to a lesser extent F# and LISP variants.
Definitely been thinking about Scala pretty hard. Even if we don't
look at a language book, concurrency would be very fun to look at too
(sort of comes built into functional programming). Been meaning to
take the time to wrap my head around the Actor Model of concurrency
lately (haven't had a lot of time though).

I'm sure you guys have some better ideas of what you want to read and
how things work though.

[Jason Meridth]

I'm for scala or erlang.

---
Jason Meridth
http://jason.lostechies.com

[Ryan Svihla]

Erlang is my "must learn really soon" language (be warned Joe Armstrong's book is hard on brains, will not be able to jam that in an hour before the meeting, so you'll have to actually read like a day before).

Scala sound awesome would be fine if that whats everyone else wants.

A very interesting vote I think for this group would be: Functional Programming For The Real World (in c# and F#) its on MEAP and would probably be perfect for introducing concepts in a familiar world for us DotNet types. Note it has most of its chapters available even though its still in beta, and I figure it'll be release by the time we are done with lean. http://www.manning.com/petricek/

--
Ryan Svihla

[Ryan Svihla]

PS going away party is at sherlocks tonight (after 5:30pm) up on thousand oaks and 281  if anyone wants to come to a smoke filled bar with all of my ex-coworkers.l I plan on making a fool of myself tonight.

--
Ryan Svihla

[Jasdeep Shah Singh]

I'll pass on the "smoke-filled" bar. Have fun though!

I think I'll vote for Scala as the number one choice. Then comes F# given our C# background.

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From: Ryan Svihla <rssv...@gmail.com>
To: san-antonio-t...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 4:18:41 PM
Subject: Re: Initial thoughts about next book?

[Jason Meridth]

Wish I could make it tonight Ryan.  Can't make it tonight.  Don't burn any bridges ;)

---
Jason Meridth
http://jason.lostechies.com

[bluehavana]

Only Scala resource I've seen worth anything. http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/

On Jul 24, 12:20 pm, Anne Epstein <aje...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Jasdeep Shah Singh]

here's a little more:
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1305#CRuby

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From: bluehavana <blueh...@gmail.com>
To: San Antonio Tech Book Club <san-antonio-t...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 4:39:18 PM

Subject: Re: Initial thoughts about next book?

[Anne Epstein]

Hi all, I heard back from Matt. He said:
"well, to really understand Functional Programming, you could do no
wrong with Real World Haskell realworldhaskell.org" .... "just as
well, it's great to have the authors on twitter with @bos31337
@donsbot and @jgoerzen who are willing to help"

http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Haskell-Bryan-OSullivan/dp/0596514980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248756854&sr=8-1

Anyway, that seems like a worthwhile book to put on the list of potentials....

[Jasdeep Shah Singh]

The book's got rave reviews. Haskell might be worth checking out, so does Scala :)

Here's something else to consider which goes back to what Ryan had said earlier. If we are all (mostly) into .NET, F# does give us a common foundation - the CLR. I was wondering if you'd be able to call say an Haskell or Scala function from C# without much trouble.

Of course functional concepts transcends the syntax of a language, however if it's possible to apply those concepts in real world programming (i meant day to day programming), we'd be seeing the benefits right away!

Having said that, I am open to Haskell or Scala or F# :)

My 2 cents!

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From: Anne Epstein <aje...@gmail.com>
To: san-antonio-t...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 11:58:16 PM

[bluehavana]

"Real World Haskell" sounds great. I was thinking Scala would be kind
of fun because it is also has objects, but that may also defeat the
purpose of learning a new paradigm (start programming in object
oriented paradigm vs. functional paradigm). Personally, I would like
to stay away from F# since there is limited support for F# on *nix.
I've heard great things about "Real World Haskell", just been a little
hesitant because of the advanced math that can be involved with
Haskell. But upon further inspection, the book seems to explain
pretty well the concepts outside math as well. I think to really get
the paradigm down, it might be great to totally blow your mind with
purely functional programming versus multi-paradigm. You can always
program functionally in almost any language with anonymous functions.
Haskell seems to have a larger community too.

But of course I'm open to anything. Thanks for doing the leg work on
recommendations Anne.

On Jul 27, 11:58 pm, Anne Epstein <aje...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I heard back from Matt. He said:
> "well, to really understand Functional Programming, you could do no
> wrong with Real World Haskell realworldhaskell.org" .... "just as
> well, it's great to have the authors on twitter with @bos31337
> @donsbot and @jgoerzen who are willing to help"
>

> http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-Haskell-Bryan-OSullivan/dp/059651498...

[Phil Dennis]

I will throw in another vote for Real World Haskell. As others pointed out it is a mostly-pure functional language which should help us focus on the functional mindset. The book has good reviews, and is even available for free online under the creative commons license.

Phil

[Anne Epstein]

Alrighty, as discussed in tonight's meeting, it sounds like there's a
good level of interest in Real World Haskell, so in order to give
anyone who wants a hard copy plenty of time to get one, I'm going to
officially declare it our next book. Psyched? I am! :)