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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

on the topic of book learning, is there some generally considered principal choice when it comes to learning Haskell? There seem to be some competing ones with widely varying opinion.

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There are indeed a lot of competing ones. Highly recommended:

• CIS 194 @ UPenn, https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall16/

• Haskell Programming from first principles, http://haskellbook.com/

• Real World Haskell, http://book.realworldhaskell.org/

RWH is great up to Chapter 4 at which point the wheels come off. LYAH is much better.

Learning Haskell by reading the most influential papers is also a good approach.

https://hackwithlambda.github.io/reading-group/

Not to be rude, but that sounds like a horrible introduction to a language for a beginner.

If you're intermediate and want to gain more insights sure. But if you don't even know the syntax it seems like an extremely inefficient way of learning any language.

The first papers in the list explain the "why" of functional programming, and later on more concrete Haskell topics are covered. Papers shouldn't be the only resource but you can supplement them with tutorials and skimming Real World Haskell. This approach of reading papers is intended to be holistic, of course you won't be churning out Haskell code within a couple days, but when learning Haskell or FP, syntax shouldn't be one of the primary focuses imo. Unless you're learning lisp.

Depends on your background of course, but Learn You a Haskell for Great Good has been pretty influential as a first look at Haskell. Read it with a REPL open.

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

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