Appendix. Epilogue: what next?

Congratulations on taking up the challenge of learning FP and making it to the end of the book! You’re now familiar with all the fundamental concepts of FP, as well as several advanced techniques. I hope that you’ve enjoyed the book, and I encourage you to share your impressions through a review, social media, or just by talking with colleagues.

By way of goodbye, I want to give you some suggestions on where to look next if you’d like to take your exploration of FP further. Your next step would probably be to learn a functional language (or a few). C# is a multiparadigm language, so you can mix and match as you like. A functional language, on the other hand, will force you to use the functional approach throughout—for example, by not allowing any state mutation at all. You’ll also find that functional languages have better syntactic support for the techniques presented in this book.

An additional benefit of learning a functional language is that it will allow you to take advantage of other learning resources: books, blogs, talks, and so on. Most learning material on FP available today has code samples in Haskell or Scala.