Learning Functional Programming in Go

Book excerpt: Function literals, Monads, Lazy evaluation, Currying, and more About This Book Write concise and maintainable code with streams and high-order functions Understand the benefits of currying your Golang functions Learn the most effective design patterns for functional programming and learn when to apply each of them Build distributed MapReduce solutions using Go Who This Book Is For This book is for Golang developers comfortable with OOP and interested in learning how to apply the functional paradigm to create robust and testable apps. Prior programming experience with Go would be helpful, but not mandatory. What You Will Learn Learn how to compose reliable applications using high-order functions Explore techniques to eliminate side-effects using FP techniques such as currying Use first-class functions to implement pure functions Understand how to implement a lambda expression in Go Compose a working application using the decorator pattern Create faster programs using lazy evaluation Use Go concurrency constructs to compose a functionality pipeline Understand category theory and what it has to do with FP In Detail Functional programming is a popular programming paradigm that is used to simplify many tasks and will help you write flexible and succinct code. It allows you to decompose your programs into smaller, highly reusable components, without applying conceptual restraints on how the software should be modularized. This book bridges the language gap for Golang developers by showing you how to create and consume functional constructs in Golang. The book is divided into four modules. The first module explains the functional style of programming; pure functional programming (FP), manipulating collections, and using high-order functions. In the second module, you will learn design patterns that you can use to build FP-style applications. In the next module, you will learn FP techniques that you can use to improve your API signatures, to increase performance, and to build better Cloud-native applications. The last module delves into the underpinnings of FP with an introduction to category theory for software developers to give you a real understanding of what pure functional programming is all about, along with applicable code examples. By the end of the book, you will be adept at building applications the functional way. Style and approach This book takes a pragmatic approach and shows you techniques to write better functional constructs in Golang. We'll also show you how use these concepts to build robust and testable apps.