Maybe I've been looking at it wrong. Those books don't exist as you have to go through C# first unless you're just gifted maybe.

I've thought OCaml might be a good F# replacement as it has its own compiler and interpreter that doesn't need the CLR/JVM and F# was mostly based off of OCaml, but it's a little awkward to me on Windows and OCaml itself seems to be a little painful (more boilerplate than expected) for doing things like IO (which I do a lot of).