Joshua F. Backfield is a Software Development Engineer at Dell SecureWorks, Inc., an industry leading MSSP. He is responsible for the design and development of many internal UI tools as well as multiple backend processes. He has over 5 years of development experience, 3 of which have been in production software. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Systems Technologies from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and a Masters of Science in Computer Science from DePaul University. He has worked in a variety of languages such as C, C++, Perl, Java, Javascript, Scala and continues to learn and grow with more languages constantly. He has ported multiple native C applications to Scala, introduced many coworkers to Scala, and taught them the underlying functional programming concepts.

If you have an imperative (and probably object-oriented) programming background, Becoming Functional will help you through the sometimes alien world of functional programming. Many functional programming books begin by focusing on the more difficult concepts such as recursion and immutability. This book lets you dive right in to functional programming by teaching the most useful implementation concepts first.

Once you finish a chapter, you’ll be able to take the concept you just learned and use it in their current day-to-day job. Each chapter introduces a problem and investigates ways to solve it by going from imperative pseudo-code to functional pseudo-code.