Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking. Eric Normand

Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development.

Summary

Distributed across servers, difficult to test, and resistant to modification—modern software is complex. Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. It introduces a unique approach to functional programming that explains why certain features of software are prone to complexity, and teaches you the functional techniques you can use to simplify these systems so that they’re easier to test and debug.

About the technology

Developers rightly fear the unintended complexity that infects most code. This book shows you how to write software that keeps complexity close to its inherent minimum. As you write software you should distinguish between code that alters your system’s state, and code that does not. Once you learn to make that distinction, you can refactor much of your state-altering “actions” into stateless “calculations.” Your software will be simpler.

About the book

The book also teaches you to solve the complex timing bugs that inevitably creep into asynchronous and multithreaded code. In ad­vanced sections of the book you learn how composable abstractions help avoid repeating code and open up new levels of expressivity.

What's inside

Patterns for simpler code

Powerful time modeling approaches to simplify asynchronous code

How higher-order functions can make code reusable and composable

About the reader

For intermediate and advanced developers building complex software. Exercises, illustrations, self-assessments, and hands-on examples lock in each new idea.

About the author

Eric Normand is an expert software developer who has been an influential teacher of functional programming since 2007.