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Comment by almostdeadguy | Hacker News Reader

> If you are looking to learn the language, I recommend Learn You A Haskell.

I definitely don't recommend this. While cute, Learn You A Haskell is lacking a lot of pragmatic advice about how to write software in haskell. It's good for getting you up to the FAM trio of type classes but leaves out a lot of practical advice around things like navigating base (what to use and ditch from it), the available community libraries, topics like monad transformers, and pragmatic advice around things like error handling, testing, and isolating effects from tests that come up very quickly in real world Haskell development.

Haskell Programming From First Principles is a much better book IMO: https://haskellbook.com/

I haven't written Haskell in a while, but there may be even better books today as well.

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Feels worth mentioning that Learn You A Haskell is about 1/3 the length of the book you mentioned.

I agree that it won't teach you all you need to know to be really proficient with the language, and also wish it didn't omit monad transformers in particular. I still like that it's an easy read, and that I could hand it to someone with pretty much zero knowledge of FP. I used sections of it as a first resource, and then learned the rest by reading documentation, which is how I usually deal with new languages.

I haven't read the book you suggested, so can't comment on the content, but seeing that the first chapter is on lambda calculus makes me a bit skeptical. Perhaps you can tell me, is the book similarly beginner friendly?

I have tried several times to learn Haskell. The only resource that actually worked for me was Philipp Hagenlocher's "Haskell for Imperative Programmers".

It is incredible. He does an amazing job of starting from the basics and then diving deep. After going through the series I had a solid enough grasp on the language to use it for practical things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgu82wiiZ90&list=PLe7Ei6viL6...

Going to give this a try later. I've had the same experience, and every time hit a point of going "I'm X levels deep in syntax I don't understand and can't see a benefit in sight..."

I'm currently reading Graham Hutton's "Programming in Haskell" (2nd), which is also another great resource. He also has YouTube videos [1] for chapters in the book. Philipp's videos are great too, which I also watch after finishing a book chapter.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBDp7ydYTHi1dh4Gnf3VTPA

I mostly agree with your recommendation against Learn You A Haskell.

However I would suggest people have a look at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

'Haskell Programming From First Principles' is a bit too fan-boyish.

I thought fanboyism was one of the first principles.

Well, you'd want enlightened fanboyism.

The only language I've seen where developers are less fanboys of it than Haskell is C++.

Try asking one what is wrong with the language.

Haskell feels like a language that's full of great ideas but overall nobody really likes it. Maybe it just needs to simmer for 30 years until someone comes up with whatever Haskell's equivalent of C++'s Rust is.

https://leanpub.com/production-haskell was released recently. I haven't read it yet, and I'm not affiliated, but it looks interesting.

I learned Haskell around 2010 starting with LYAH followed by Real World Haskell. I too wouldn't recommend LYAH for actually learning Haskell in $CURRENT_YEAR now that there are manifold and much better resources on the topic now, such as Haskell From First Principles. LYAH was quite hilarious and entertaining, but I think its time has passed. I don't use Haskell a whole lot these days, but to this day Haskell is still one of my Blub languages.

This conversation reminds me I need to get back to No starch's book about learning Physics with Haskell. Grabbed it cheap but haven't gotten back to it.

> While cute, Learn You A Haskell is lacking a lot of pragmatic advice about how to write software in haskell.

No book can give pragmatic advice on that topic, it's an ecosystem that evolves poorly and (lately) quite fast.

You recommend HPFFP but it's also a dated resource for anything but learning nowadays.

You can read LYAH and go build a project. You may have to also read Haddocks but LYAH equips you to understand them and okay type tetris.

You can definitely read LYAH and read the scotty and postgresql-simple docs and be on your way. You may also want to reference the GHC manual.

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