You Learn a Haskell Great for Good!: A beginner's Guide

it's all in the name: You Learn a Haskell Great for Good! is a hilarious, illustrated guide to this complex functional language. Packed with the author's original artwork, pop culture references, and most importantly, useful example code, this book teaches functional fundamentals in a way you never thought possible.

you'll start with the kid stuff: basic syntax, recursion, types and type classes. Then once you've got the basics down, the real black belt master-class begins: you'll learn to use applicative функторів, monads, zippers, and all the other mythical Haskell constructs you've only read about in storybooks.

As you work your way through the author's imaginative (and occasionally insane) examples, you'll learn to:

• Laugh in the face of side effects as you wield purely functional programming techniques
• Use the magic of Haskell's "laziness" to play with infinite sets of data
• Organize your programs creating by your own types, type classes and modules
• Use Haskell's elegant input/output system to share the genius of your programs with the outside world
• Short of eating the author's brain, you will not find a better way to learn this powerful language than reading You Learn a Haskell Great for Good!

Excerpt from the Introduction

Haskell is fun, and that's what it's all about!

This book is aimed at people who have experience programming in imperative languages-such as C++, Java, Python and-and now want to try out Haskell. But even if you don't have any significant programming experience, i'll bet a smart person like you will be able to follow along and learn Haskell.

My first reaction to Haskell was that the language was just too weird. But after getting over that initial hurdle, it was smooth sailing. Even if Haskell seems strange to you at first, don't give up. Learning Haskell is almost like learning to program for the first time all over again. It's fun, and it forces you to think differently.

NOTE

If you ever get really stuck, the IRC channel #haskell on the freenode network is a great place to ask questions. The people there tend to be nice, patient, and understanding. They're a great resource for Haskell newbies.

About the Author

Miran Lipovaca is a computer science student in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In addition to his passion for Haskell, he enjoys boxing, playing bass guitar, and, of course, drawing. He has a fascination dancing with skeletons and the number 71, and when he walks through automatic doors he pretends that he's actually opening them with his mind.