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| Book: | Real World Haskell | |
| Subject: | Good Book for those stepping into the Haskell world | |
| Date: | 2009-06-02 15:24:03 | |
| From: | Jeff Bergman | |
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Rating:
Real World Haskell is very ambitious in its scope. It tries to gradually introduce the Haskell way of doing things such that even someone coming from an imperative programming background can follow. As a consequence some concepts are not formally explained until later in the book, like Monads. Instead the book shows you how to use Haskell's I/O facilities, without an understanding of Monads, first. For some this approach is probably very practical but I found myself at times wanting the material to be presented in a different order. However, I am still giving this book 5 stars because of the sheer breadth and quality of the content and examples. And the later chapters really do tie all the concepts together with some non-trivial examples. The first four chapters and chapter six lay the foundation for the rest of the book. I found that a good understanding of this material was crucial for later chapters, where they combine different features of the language in more complicated ways. After that I was particularly fond of chapters 10, 13,14, 15, 16, 18, and 26, as these chapters explained some of the more advanced concepts I was interested in like Monads, Parsing, and Functional Data Structures. Overall, I learned a ton of new things from reading this book even thought the material is quite challenging in places, and found myself wondering why more people don't use Haskell. |
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