Comments about O'Reilly Media Functional Programming for Java Developers:

Functional Programming is back! After 2-3 decades of Object Oriented Programming which made languages like Lisp seem like a dinosaur, the software community has turned its focus back on FP. And with good reason! OOP has fallen short of the demands of concurrent programming leading to convoluted code that only a few experts can read and write. New FP languages today like Scala or Clojure address this issue by providing a robust language that can run on the good old reliable JVM. That way you don't need a huge change in your infrastructure - just add a few jars and you are ready to dive in. This book will teach you how.

If you have been wondering about Software Transactional Memory, The Actor Model, MapReduce, and other buzz words that have been going around lately, its time to pick this book. The author does a fine job of explaining what FP is, what it aims to solve, when to use it, and how to get started with it. The author explains very well the differences between imperative (OOP) and declarative (FP) programming.

This book is a brief introductory book that scratches the FP arena. By no means there is any depth provided. Developers looking for developing expertise in a particular FP language have to look elsewhere but might benefit from reading this book to get a good overview.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Functional Programming for Java Developers:

It was with eagerness and anticipation that I picked up a copy of "Functional Programming for Java Developers". I'd heard about it on twitter, and conversations with my resident functional guru (Tony Morris) got me excited about the potential for this book.

In the end it made for a quick read. Having spent many hours working through functional exercises with Tony meant that I'd already been introduced to the majority of the ideas covered in the book, and so I fell outside the main target audience of java developers who haven't done functional programming, but are interested. I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who hasn't done functional programming, and is interested, but not to people who've already had exposure.

As the target audience for the book is for that group of people, I think it gets it spot on, and anyone in that group should grab a copy. The coverage of functional programming using Java is good, and the bibliography and list of next steps is great. I've marked this book for intermediate/novices. It's actually for decent Java Developers, but novices to the Functional Programming ideas.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Functional Programming for Java Developers:

Explains the functional programming concepts well, although examples are in java, non-java developers should have no problem following along. Best part is that it is concise and short I think will read it again. This should be a must read before you start to learn a functional language such as scala.