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Is there's any other book in computer science that takes a thorny academic subject and makes it so approachable that pretty much any engineer can grasp it without trouble?

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Learn You A Haskell makes monads pretty understandable. If sophomores can get it, engineers should be able to.

The way to learn monads is to just avoid them while hacking Haskell (or another functional language) and find the boilerplate of handling things like state or errors annoying. I truly don't believe any other way is as effective.

Put another way, use each monad instance on its own, and ignore that it's a monad in the first place (ie. use the IO monad, but pretend the syntax is IO specific, use the List monad, but pretend the syntax is List specific etc.)

After you do enough of these, you'll start to see the common pattern, and wish there was a way to abstract over them. Surprise: there is!

This is basically I assume monads were developed as well.

This is the approach of the popular book Functional Programming in Scala.

i thought the little typer does also a great job in getting you into thinking about type theory.

The Reasoned Schemer does an excellent job in getting you to understand Logic Programming

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