There comes a time when you just have to stop working for a minute and take a few moments to enjoy the fruits of your hard labor. For me, one of these moments lately came when I received the author copies of our book, Expert F# 2.0. The next day I took the big box of books into my office, and my girlfriend insisted that we take a picture - at least to compromise myself a bit:

And no, I don't have a similar picture for the first edition - too bad, it would be awesome to compare... You may not see it right away, but there is quite a bit of sleeplessness in that picture 😃 Not because of the years of work to get this book written (well, a little bit of that too), but because of the vast celebration we put up the day before - and needless to say, I can't show you pictures of that, unfortunately - for one, there wasn't anyone sober around to take them 😉

So what's new in this edition? Well, Don's announcement a while ago gave you a brief summary and a bit of insight into the naming fiasco we had. Overall, I am pretty happy about the new title, it's a natural choice given the changes in this new edition. So without further ado, these include:

• Updated source code to use the latest F# 2.0
• Changes to the generic comparison, equality, and hashing sections
• Updates to various sections in the asynchronous programming chapter
• A new section on WPF
• A new section on units of measure
• A new section on WebSharper

Overall, the whole book was retouched, reworked, and thoroughly reviewed once again (thanks Andre!), and you can see that from the outside also - the book itself got smaller and lost its hard cover (too bad for that), and the font used also changed quite sharply. Overall, there are slightly fewer pages yet with more content, just as it should be. I am extremely happy about including nearly a dozen pages of WebSharper material, walking the reader through getting started with WebSharper, and in particular using formlets to develop type-safe user interfaces with minimal effort.

There is not one day when I don't talk to our readers about our book. There is no doubt, the most fulfilling part of writing a book is hearing from new readers daily, via emails, via phone calls, or in person. Having been involved in two of the most successful books about F# is simply a blast - definitely a life-changer. Happy reading!