Chapter 9. Functional Programming Techniques for Better State Management

While writing concurrent/parallel code, handling state is difficult in an imperative program (something that you would have seen by now). Modern languages and platforms borrow idioms and practices that enable better state management and facilitate strong concurrency models from the functional programming community. In this chapter, we will see what those are and try to understand, through code samples, how to best leverage some of those features (striving for coverage would stretch this chapter to an entire book) to our advantage. We would also see how C# has evolved as a language to bring the best of both worlds (imperative and functional), and to help you apply functional thinking to model real-world scenarios. This chapter will also cover Language Integrated Query (LINQ) as a mechanism for writing compositional code. Through this journey, we will uncover some good design practices, leveraging the functional constructs...