16 Where next?

 

This chapter covers

  • How to get more practical experience in F#
  • Introducing F# to your team
  • Engaging with the F# community
  • Advanced F# language features

You’ve made it to the final chapter of the book. Congratulations! At this point, you have all the tools you need to start writing F# in practical applications. However, your F# journey is (unsurprisingly) not finished—after all, if you could read a medium-sized book like this and become an expert in any language, software developers wouldn’t be anywhere as highly in demand as they are today.

How do you then make the leap from someone who has used F# in some small examples and seen some sample applications to someone confident enough to use F# in the real world? The answer is simple: by doing F#. If you and your colleagues want to write production-ready F#, this book should act as a guide to solving practical questions you’ll face. However, you’ll still need to go through the pain of trying things out in the real world (i.e., in your own business domain) until you build the muscle memory to model real-world concepts effectively in F#. This is no different from learning any other kind of skill. Think about learning to drive a car or bicycle, another spoken language, or a musical instrument: you can read all you want, but you’ll need to actually do it in the real world before you really have that confidence and belief.

16.1 How do I start using F# in practice?

16.1.1 Data analysis

16.1.2 Hobby projects

16.1.3 Coding challenges

16.1.4 Before-and-after proof of concept

16.1.5 Operational scripts

16.2 How do I introduce F# to my team?

16.3 The F# community

16.3.1 Social media

16.3.2 Conferences and user groups

16.3.3 Open source

16.4 Advanced F# language features

16.4.1 Units of Measure

16.4.2 Active Patterns

16.4.3 Type Extensions