#147 overall
Professor Frisby Introduces Composable Functional JavaScript
egghead.io
4 recommenders · 3 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2018–2020 · score 3.0
A free video course by Brian Lonsdorf (Professor Frisby) on egghead.io introducing composable functional programming in JavaScript, using stop-motion animation. It accompanies his Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming book.
Commenters praise it as a quirky, free companion to the Mostly Adequate Guide, with content they found useful despite the unusual presentation.
Programming Languagesbeginnerfreevideo lectures#functional programming#javascript#composition#lonsdorf#stop motion
Recommendations by year
20062026
I _love_ the videos on the Professor Frisbee Egghead course.
I learned a lot from the course content and the classroom stop-motion animations were refreshing; it kept me watching with a smile on my face.
It's nice to have some personality and silliness in an online classroom environment; very little differentiates the various JS teaching sites other than their media players and subject matter coverage right now.
Daniel Shiffman's unique style also breaks the “person tonelessly narrating to occasional cursor movements over a screencap” standard that lots of online courses have settled into, and is similarly engaging as a result: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvjgXvBlbQiydffZU7m1_aw
Awesome resource! The companion course on egghead is also great and quirky: https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-compo...
Great book. I'd also recommend his free video course on Egghead. It's rather quirky, which is something that I very much enjoyed: https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-compo...
Here’s some I’ve used. Mostly just beginner stuff though.
Professor Frisby’s mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming by Brian Lunsdorf is great[1]. A pretty solid book meant for beginners that introduces functional programming in a simple manner without over burdening you with all the math. It uses JavaScript, and helps you create a lot of the functional programming patterns yourself.
Learn You a Haskell For Great Good [2]. This book is pretty light hearted and an entertaining read. It’s for beginners. I’ve heard a good follow up to this one is Real World Haskell, but I’ve also heard the code for it is outdated, but I’m not certain whether it is (I’ve never read it.)
There is a course on egghead.io that is free by Brian Lonsdorf the author of the Mostly Adequate guide [3]. I hesitate recommending this one as it’s got a pretty different approach and uses stop motion that can take some getting used to and the voices can be somewhat annoying, but overall great content wise and covers many of the things in the Mostly Adequate guide. He also does a course on Frontend Masters which is just him giving a workshop in person so no stop motion or weird voices.
Lastly I haven’t actually read this one even though I believe I purchased it when I first saw it announced by the author and it is, Functional Light JavaScript by Kyle Simpson [4]. Great author that always takes a r ally great approach to explaining things he wrote the You Don’t Know JS series that he released through O’Reilly and also put up on github. Kyle Simpson also has a course on Frontend Masters modeled after his book Functional Light JavaScript.
[1]: https://github.com/MostlyAdequate/mostly-adequate-guide/blob...
[2]: http://www.learnyouahaskell.com
[3]: https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-compo...
[4]: https://leanpub.com/fljs
The interplay between content and presentation is a symbiotic relationship where either side can drag down the whole. I loved the content of the Frisby egghead course, but have to admit that I had trouble finishing it because the presentation became tiresome for me. I also felt like I couldn't listen to it within earshot (or view) of anyone for fear of looking like a child watching cartoons.
There's no point in attacking the course based on this aspect of its presentation. If it were super polished but made a bunch of mistakes, that's when you need to shout loudly to anyone you care about "don't watch that course! It's full of mistakes!"