Book on Haskell? | Hacker News Reader

Book on Haskell?

6 pointsraju8 comments

I was thinking of diving into Haskell soon, and was wondering, any suggestions for good books/tutorials out there? I am relatively new to FP, and looked on Amazon for some good books, and there seems to be three contenders

1.Programming in Haskell 2.The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia 3. Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming

Any thoughts/words of advice?

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The School of Expression book is pretty nice and the only one I've had serious experience with, I'd definitely suggest taking a look at it.

One thing about the Haskell community that is a breath of cool, minty and decidedly fresh air is that #haskell is actually a great channel to hang out in and ask questions. They have a very powerful bot, Lambdabot, there which helps with examples and manual searching and the people are generally extraordinarily patient and helpful.

I'd say that once you get through the basics, heading to IRC to ask some more complex questions is not a bad idea. Prepare to have your mind blown, though, as topics that roam there can be pretty heady sometimes.

There's a new Haskell book coming written by well known people in the Haskell community: Real World Haskell (http://www.realworldhaskell.org/). I would advice to read a few tutorials on the net first to get a feeling of the language. Download GHC and experiment with GHCi. When you hit a roadblock (which definitely will come because functional programming is different) leave it for some time and do other programming and perhaps think about how you would do it in a functional language. Just take small steps.

I've been trying to get through SOE and The Craft of Functional Programming. Neither is remarkably helpful to me for learning the language.

They both make confusing (to me, at least) use of math symbols when showing what I think are code examples; they use poor typography to delineate code examples from abstract snippets; and do not seem to give much detail on editing, loading, and running code.

In fact, The Craft of Functional Programming has an appendix that shows the mapping of math glyphs to what you will actually type when editing code, and then uses the math glyphs in the code examples. Perhaps someone with some Haskell chops can explain this; it was yet another WTF experience for me.

The tutorials that I've found most helpful are "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" and the one on Lisperati (http://lisperati.com/haskell/).

Perhaps the two books I have will make more sense once I get more familiar with the basic mechanics of written and running simple, useful apps. Craft of Functional Programming actual has been helpful in explaining some of the underlying nuts and bolts, but I learn much better when I have some basic, complete code I can experiment with.

In the end, I expect that I'll learn Haskell by writing my own tutorial.

I've been working through Yet Another Haskell Tutorial. It's the best that I've found so far. Here's the link:

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/htut/

Ah! Yes, I believe this has been mentioned in earlier articles, and I thought of that today morning. I guess its easy to take a look at that, and then take on some of the suggestions that the other hackers have put up.

Thank you, all of you, hopefully I will have my mind blown away.

I just got "The Haskell Road to Maths and Logic", and I am enjoying it so far. It is heavy on the math and theory, so if you are looking for just a practical book it may not be the right one.

I liked The Haskell School of Expression. It was a good first Haskell book. Read it, but also learn by doing, of course.

Actually the haskell site (haskell.org) has some amazing tutorials you can use.

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