April 27, 2018

Learning to program in Haskell

Books

Far and away, "learn you a Haskell" is the best resource to learn Haskell. You can read the whole book online or buy a copy. I did both! It has certainly served me well. The writing style is fun and the author knows his Haskell. This book is the best resource there is, hands down.

The book "The Craft of Functional Programming" is not worth your time. My advice is simple -- forget it, go with "Learn you a Haskell". This book is in a third edition (circa 2011). I found an inexpensive used copy of the second edition (1999), and even that money was essentially wasted. This is a textbook, and you might be forced to buy it for your course. If so, that is too bad.

Real World Haskell is a bad book! This is not to say you should not buy and study it, but realize that this is like buying a car with a broken transmission with the understanding that you are going to learn a lot repairing it. See my notes.

the Haskell standard Prelude

Studying the prelude is a great way to learn things and answer a lot of questions. The prelude is chapter 8 in the Haskell 98 report, which is something else you should study if you are at all serious about learning Haskell. If you are going to dive into that, you may get ideas about looking at the source for GHC: So I did as recommended and cloned as follows: 
git clone --recursive git://git.haskell.org/ghc.git

Online Resources

Aside from these printed books, there are lots of interesting online tutorials; I provide links to a few that look good. Actually there are no end of online resources for learning Haskell, the trick is picking the good ones if you are going to invest your time.

I give special kudos to the "fast and hard" tutorial because it begins (like every tutorial should) with a one line "hello world" example.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org