You Could Have Invented Monads (And Maybe You Already Have)

In addition to this, another great Haskell+monads learning source is Real World Haskell, whose exercises will have you implement your own monads without telling you, and then reveal the surprise later.

Well, it would have been a surprise, but I just spoiled it. Anyway, get reading :)

This is the explanation of Monads that made it click for me.

I actually had déja vu because I had written code very much like this before in Haskell. It got ugly real quick, and I remember thinking 'there has to be a better way of doing this'. Turns out I was right.

The only blog-style "monad tutorial" anyone should read.

(Everyone should read Meet The Monads and the Typeclassopedia, of course.)

Another excellent introduction to monads for experienced imperative programmers, particularly those familiar with C#, is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wesdyer/archive/2008/01/11/the-marvels...

Here is my favorite monad tutorial: http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/01/monads-in-python-with-n... . The reason I like it is because it uses Python rather than Haskell while pointing out that you can build monads in any language that supports objects or closures.

Actually, now that I think about it, it seems to me that pythonic monads should really be context managers, so they can be used like:

    with SomeMonad:
        do stuff