New Edition of “Programming in Haskell” Now Available | Hacker News Reader

New Edition of “Programming in Haskell” Now Available

cs.nott.ac.uk

117 pointsjavinpaul23 comments

Forward written by Erik Meijer -- https://twitter.com/headinthebox/status/737402063106113536

Lecture slides for chapters 1 to 10: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/Slides.zip

Haskell code for all the extended programming examples: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/Code.zip

As an aside, https://github.com/0xmohit/talks contains pointers to some interesting talks on Haskell.

This is the Haskell tutorial book that I have always recommended. It's a manageable size and is a good blend of theory and practice. There's also none more qualified than Graham Hutton.

Have you read Haskell Programming From First Principles? (http://haskellbook.com/). Do you know how the two compare?

Hutton's book is more concise and written better. From first principles covers slightly more material, at the expense of being 4 times longer.

No I haven't read any of it. Is it even finished yet? I would still try Graham's book first and see how you go.

Same here, and I always recommend to go through it together with Erik Meijer in his Functional Programming Fundamentals Chapter lecture series on Channel9 (https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Fun...). I wish more programming books were written like this, with emphasis on exercises rather than heaps of text.

I've always recommended this book too. It's one of the few books that tries to teach (functional) programming instead of a particular language, although obviously you learn Haskell along the way.

Also interesting is Data Structures and Functional Programming [0] using OCaml.

[0] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs3110/2016fa/

There's also this course given by University of Glasgow coming up on September 19th (it's Haskell, though): https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/functional-programming-h...

This looks like a great course to take along with the [FUN](https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/sessio...) MOOC coming up later this month.

How does this compare to Haskell Programming[1]?

[1] http://haskellbook.com

I haven't read the book OP linked, but I've been going through Haskell Programming from First Principles for the last 6 weeks or so and it's been fantastic. The price tag is well worth it in terms of frustration and time saved. I'm about two thirds done.

I really like that it builds up from the basics, starting from lambda calculus, and is also very complete in explaining every concept. I don't feel like anything is left unexplained. This is important, because coming from dynamically typed imperative languages, a lot of concepts in Haskell are so alien that you feel like you're learning programming all over again.

The exercises set it apart from other resources. They're plentiful, start simple, but quickly increase in difficulty. A lot of times I thought I had a concept mastered until the exercises presented gaps in my knowledge -- which made me learn the concept that much better.

The completeness means it's a long book (currently 1233 pages). You'll probably need a healthy dose of existing motivation to learn Haskell to get through it.

+1 for Allen & Moronuki. Long. Well written. Won't repeat what's already been said.

Just got the book and am impressed. But new to Haskell, I'm actually making my way through the much shorter, free and very well written "YetAnotherHaskellTutorial" first, because I wan't to have a general working knowledge of the language before settling down to the 1000+ page hard slog.

Lists get discussed about 700 pages in, so while the book is very thorough--I like that it opens with Lambda Calculus--it seems a little wax on wax off if you haven't first gotten your feet wet via other means.

"Programming in Haskell", which is the book linked to here, is only 320 pages long, so I think you are confusing it with "Haskell Programming from First Principles", which is over 1200 pages long.

Your'e right, nothing good ever comes out of posting late at night...

That T.O.C. looks really good. Its still "not yet released" on Amazon it looks like, hopefully soon.

There is also this which is upcoming but available now to read:

https://www.manning.com/books/learn-haskell

Manning releases really quality titles in my opinion and this looks to be in keeping with their standard I think.

I agree about Manning quality. They are sometimes late in delivery (eg, iOS books come out later than the competition).

> All concepts are explained from first principles and no programming experience is required

Nice, it looks like it is a good book for beginners. I hesitated between Haskell and F# as a first "real" FP language, I might give Haskell a try.

Haskell is definitely easier to dive into than OCaml and F#. I haven't made anything big with it, so can't comment on how it is to use in a project or anything, but to learn functional programming it seems like the best choice.

Anyone know some particularly good Haskell books for intermediate Haskellers? Ones that skip over all the syntax and basic grammar, and dive more into whole-program structure, how to connect different parts together, rather than looking at individual parts.

I like Real World Haskell. It does have a small intro explaining the basic stuff but it contains a lot of case studies and chapters about data structures, guis, web servers etc. And it's available online for free: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/

As a beginner I also strongly recommend Real World Haskell precisely because it gives examples of realistic applications. For me it was quite revealing that once one sees through syntax, the key difference of programming in Haskell from writing code in more mainstream languages is not the functional aspect but rather very explicit state management.

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