How to learn GUI programming in F# [closed]

Question

These days I am interested in learning F#, and would like to use it for GUI applications. Unfortunately I have no previous background in .Net or C#. Are there any good resources (web sites, books) for learning this without going through C# first?

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The Real-world Functional Programming book that I wrote with Jon Skeet (sorry for the advertisement!) expects some existing knowledge of object-oriented languages (e.g. C#) but it briefly explains all more advanced features that C# has compared to, for example, Java.

It has a few examples of GUI programming using WinForms (a more modern framework would be WPF, but some concepts are essentially the same). You can take a look at a few examples, because there is some free content related to GUI:

• Chapter 4 (coincidentally, available as a free sample :-)) shows how to implement an application for drawing simple graphs using basic features.
• Programming user interfaces using workflows (free excerpt) shows one advanced pattern that's very useful for writing reactive applications (as I know, this isn't described anywhere else in much details)

As far as I know, Robert Pickering's Beginning F# also has some user interface examples and it also includes some WPF examples (although I don't have the book yet, so I don't know what exactly does it contain).

However, none of the F# books will make you GUI Expert. You'll still need to spend some time learning about WinForms/Silverlight/WPF in more details. There are plenty of examples in C# on the internet and after reading one of the above, you should be able to translate them directly to F#, but buying a technology-specific book may be a good idea too.

Answer 2

I just got the The Real-world Functional Programming book and if you want to mix F# with GUI stuff that's the book for you since it has plenty of examples and it jumps right into it. That's the main reason I got it :) Online I've come across this and I like the F#/DirectX example. F#.NET tutorials and examples