100% this, I spent many months going through the most recent books on F# including one which the latest version was only released last year I think.
They all seem to try and shield you from the fact that you are much better placed if coming from C# (which everyone seems to refer to as .net these days) and have a solid understanding of the .net class library.
All the main web frameworks sit on top of asp.net and pretty much all official documentation for that is in c#
Such a shame because I learnt so much about types from trying to crack f# for real world application. fsharpforfunandprofit taught me heaps which I apply to other languages, but I don't want to become a c# developer which comes with all the years of changing best practices to be able to really be productive in f#.
Sorry if I am coming across as bitter but I just can't see learning f# in isolation from c# which is an absolute shame.
Gleam from a language perspective seems really nice - but it's in it's ramp up stage, I will go through the Gleam Exrercism track and keep an eye on it. It would be great if it became the general purpose typed pragmatic functional language with a large ecosystem I am after!
I have been learning F# for a while now, and while the functional side that is pushed heavily is a joy to use, anything that touches the 'outside world' is going to have way more resources for C# as far as libraries, official documentation, general information including tutorials etc. You will need to understand and work with those.
So you really do need to understand C# syntax and semantics. Additionally there are a few concepts that seem the same in each language but have different implementations and are not compatible (async vs tasks, records) so there is additional stuff to know about when mentally translating between C# and F#.
I really want to love F# but keep banging my head against the wall. Elixir while not being typed yet and not being as general purpose at least allows me to be productive with it's outstanding documentation, abundance of tutorials and books on both the core language and domain specific applications. It is also very easy to mentally translate erlang to elixir and vice versa in the very few occasions needed.
Agreed, even with f# a first class citizen in the .net world, written, maintained and distributed by Microsoft, I still have needed to gain a working knowledge of c# to properly interact with the .net libs and third party libs (which I absolutely need to do as the f# ecosystem is tiny compared to c#). So at the end of the day I needed to learn two languages to atain my goal of learning one enough to be useful.
Disclaimer - I am still learning both - I am no expert on either - and I am still strugling!
I was looking for an alternative to rescript and literally just started looking at Fable this week - and absolutely love it in conjunction with Elmish.
Why do they insist on forcing their framework of the week on their dev community and make it much easier to bring your own framework? NIH syndrome? Lock in?
We use react and visualforce to get our products built but the visualforce requirement to do so is sub optimal.
For me it is not a book that teaches Racket though - and not a book to pick up web dev in Racket though.
If there was tutorials on how to do Sinatra, Express or Flask style web apps/apis I think people who use those types of frameworks would find it more accessible. And there are a lot of those type of people.
I think if I ever have time for another go I would learn enough to be proficient in c# before diving back in.