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Comment by oalessandr | Hacker News Reader

Another good (imho better) option is the Haskell book https://haskellbook.com/

Not to start a flame war, but imho this is my definition of a "terrible book". Of the everything and the kitchen sink variety. By contrast, I very much enjoyed LYAH, not least for its self-effacing humor. Hutton was too dry for me. There's a less well-known "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" book by Richard Bird that is concise and targets the mathematically inclined crowd.

It is something that is marketed very well. From the sample content, It didn't look interesting to me at all.

LYAH may not be the greatest Haskell tutorial. But it makes an easy read. That means, you are not afraid to go back to it again and again, Which is the crucial aspect of learning anything sufficiently complex or new or both..

I agree re: marketing -- something I had easily fell for. One of the authors has moved onto writing another Haskell book (a "work of art" apparently), but this time my interest, for an intermediate level book, is elsewhere: https://intermediatehaskell.com/ (which would be more informative--thus pedagogically sound--than a work of art).

Lesson learned: don't fall for the marketing of art.

Generally the best way to learn is by actually doing projects: http://www.haskellforall.com/2017/10/advice-for-haskell-begi...

Why is "everything and the kitchen sink" terrible? Thoroughness is appealing. You aren't obligated to read all of it.

I personally favor thin books that present what really matters after having digested it first. Not that there's no place for thick books on my shelves (CLRS among others). I find HaskellWiki/Hoogle better serve the use case that the Haskell Book seems to target.

He of functional programming with bananas etc.?

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Very practical, and the way the chapters are organized really feels right. The excercises and examples really help drive the concepts home.

In my opinion, Learn You A Haskell is a poor resource to learn the language and for some readers seems to be actually counterproductive (I have two friends who got through LYAH and then tried actually using Haskell, realized they have no idea how to actually use the language, and give up on Haskell altogether :( If only they'd used The Haskell Book...)

I read more than half of this book, and sadly I did not enjoy it at all. Read it only if you enjoy long-winded verbose explanations. Hutton's or Bird's is concise yet explanatory.

It was valuable to me as pretty much the only Haskell resource I read that addressed more complex concepts without hitting a point where they needed to resort to mathematics.

I've never had to resort to mathematics (like category theory) when learning to use Haskell in real-world projects. And I don't think Hutton's or Bird's rely on mathematics for teaching Haskell.

Can you give me one such example?

Does the verbosity interfere or can you skip over details you don't need?

Well, if you are reading the chapter, it's because you want to understand it. Since everything in this book is verbose, you can't just skip the verbose parts.

Half the examples contain jokes or cutesy animal sounds (onomatopoeia). I like jokes, but it is distracting me. Especially when I don't understand the cultural reference.

My biggest gripe with the book is that the examples can feel quite contrived. Its probably super hard to make a book featuring all concepts without having contrived examples. But I remember reading a chapter and some arbitrary abstraction is introduced. Problem is, based on that example, I don't realize when the abstraction is useful.

It might be impossible to write a Haskell book that is neither terse not unnecessarily verbose.

Since you can get some chapters for free, I'd recommend you just download them and see if you like the style.

Currently:

>This site can’t be reached >haskellbook.com refused to connect.

HN readers hitting the site?

http version is up and running. maybe it's just a certificate thing: http://haskellbook.com/

That link works, thanks.

It seems that it's development is stagnating, no visible updates for a long time, though I'm eagerly waiting for the release of it's final printed edition.

The book is functionally complete. We're not waiting on any new chapters or anything. If you want a printed edition I wouldn't wait. The digital version is very good though.

I wouldn’t hold your breath. Julie stopped work on it a long time ago. It’s pretty good as is though.

afaik all the chapters are written. the version you get on gumroad is final.

Agreed. Now that I found I like org-mode plus org-babel-tangle I'm planning to re-read it solving the exercises.

LYAH however is a few days read. It lets you to get closer to start learning haskell, but not even in the same league.

Very good book! Definitely the best one out there

But it costs $59 dollars, and you don't have the option of buying a print book.

LYAH is more appealing for early learners, since it's free.

The Haskell wikibook[1] is a better free resource.

[1]: https://wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

for others that run into problems with the link: it does not work with https:// (at least for me)

Change it to http://www.haskellbook.com

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