Programming in Haskell

Before getting this book, I had tried various well-known resources for learning Haskell, including Miran Lipovaca's 'Learn You a Haskell' and Simon Thompson's 'Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming'. None of these managed to get me engaged enough to keep going for much longer than a few hours. This book — Graham Hutton's 'Programming in Haskell' — get's it right. Graham strikes a good balance between short, but decent theoretical explanations and practical exercises. If you are anything like me and need to use new information in practise in order to assimilate it, you will appreciate the many opportunities this book gives to do exactly this. The chapters aren't dense at all. In chapter 5 of 17, the reader is guided through an implementation of the Caesar Cipher in nine lines of extremely easy to understand code — five lines excluding the type-signatures, which are there mainly for documentation purposes. The code isn't introduced all at once, but beautifully worked out step-by-step under the reader's eyes (and within the scope of anyone's understanding!). Moreover, Graham then shows how to implement a function that takes caesar-enciphered text, finds the secret key and deciphers the whole thing — all automatically based on simple maths. The whole implementation is so well explained, that I was able to come up with my own version just from reading his explanations and without looking at the code, which I covered up. This felt really empowering and it was very eye-opening to notice differences between his implementations and mine. I don't regret buying 'Programming in Haskell' when it was released two weeks ago. I have worked through almost a third of it now, even though I don't have that much time. Graham has managed to make it so addictive, that I keep "forgetting" about chores to buy myself some time with this book and — oh boy does it make time fly! If you've read this review until here, then don't stop now, because I have a little secret. I actually found this book because I was following Erik Meijer's Functional Programming 101x lectures on edx.org, which I strongly advise you should also have a look at if you haven't already — it is completely free. Erik just delivers in the most entertaining and unpretentious way possible. This book (its first edition, to be precise) is the recommended companion for Erik's lectures and the two go together like bread and butter. If you are worried that Haskell is too difficult for you, then don't be. I am a second year undergraduate student of Computer Science and have been studying Java at university so far. I think Haskell makes much more sense than Java and any of the other languages I have seen so far. Don't shy away from Haskell, whether you are a n00b or an old hand — it's beautiful and this book makes understanding it straightforward. Bottom line: buy this book or pester someone to buy it for you. It's worth it.

I have the previous edition, which I gave 4/5 stars for. This version is well worth the 5 out 5 rating for me. The content is expanded and very clear on core concepts. Even if you are a FP using Scala say - get this book. The concise definitions and examples for concepts such as Functor, Applicatives, Monads and where to use, is bar none the best intuitive explanation I've come across. I've seen so many overblown descriptions of effectual stacks, MTL, etc. etc. this does the basics so you will have the right intuition to carry on and learn more. So for people new to FP, this is the book to have, even if you aren't a Haskell developer. Can't recommend this book highly enough.

It is a near perfect mixture of clarity and terseness. Graham's explanations contain all the information you need to know to understand the various concepts, even if sometimes that's not immediately obvious. In my opinion there is no easy way around some of the more abstract concepts in Haskell, you just have to keep attacking them till they click. I found myself going back and rereading chapters many times and each time I gained a deeper understanding. It is also vital that you actually write code in Haskell. You simply can't learn it passively by reading a book no matter how great that book is. For example I wrote a fair amount of code that mapped a function over a structure where I needed to carry some state around to do the mapping. It can be done "by hand" using fold and manually threading the state but it really is tedious. As it's easy enough to do I kept doing it and it kept being tedious to the point where it annoyed me enough to really try to alleviate it. I went back to the book and this time both Traversables and the State monad finally clicked.

I've been looking at textbooks for the 2nd year university module I will be teaching in the coming year, an introduction to functional programming, and this is the best Haskell-based textbook that I've found. Not as detailed as some, it covers the key points concisely, with relevant but not overly-long examples. It might be a bit tricky to follow for someone new to programming as well as being new to the functional programming paradigm, but for my students, with a solid year (at least) of Computer Science studies, it is pitched perfectly.

Amazing book! As a newcomer to Functional Programming, this book really helps to break down the subject into small understandable chunks. The exercises are great at cementing what has been covered in the chapter too.

A really great introduction to Haskell, especially applicatives and monads.

The more I read this book the more I get frustrated. The book is a waste of time and money. Exercises are ridiculous, no explanations. They aren’t even exercises, just examples without explanation. The book introduces types but then keeps giving examples of functions which are not introduced yet… Everything is frustrating in that book.

Very easy to follow book, best I've read

It has a nice way to explain things and point out why things are useful or not.

Good read. But found later chapters too difficult to grasp.

The book came on time and was perfect. No damages

This is more a review of Amazon’s service than the book itself. The first copy I received was printed backwards and offset, completely useless. The Amazon return service sent me a new one immediately and didn’t need me to ship the old one back. The second copy was perfect. Great service, very pleased.

Direi essenziale per chi vuole imparare la programmazione funzionale, attraverso Haskell, un linguaggio di programmazione puro (senza side effects). Raccoglie teoria, esempi ed esercizi. Consigliato a studenti di informatica/matematica. Richiede poche conoscenze di base.