Book Suggestion

James Britt james.g.britt at gmail.com
Thu Jul 17 18:01:16 EDT 2008


Chad Wilson wrote:
 > Have any of you fellow n00bs ordered a book on Haskell?  Or are you
 > just using the haskell.org web site?  I think I need to get me a book
 > to keep as a reference.

I've a few.

Introduction to Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell
ISBN-10: 0521277248


Programming in Haskell
ISBN-10: 0521692695


The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming 
through Multimedia
ISBN-10: 0521644089


I find the first to be about the best of the three.  I thought The 
School of Expression did a poor job of explaining how to actually edit 
and run code; the layout and typography does not make it clear enough to 
me when something is meant as an abstract code snippet, and when it's 
code you could (or should) plausibly run.

On the Web, I really liked "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours" if only 
because it shows how to edit and run actual code right for the start, 
and code that will read and write to and from the command line.  (Seems 
many tutorials and books spend forever explaining types and and other 
abstractions while not giving test code to run and poke and break and 
fix. )   I learn best when I have sample code I can experiment with; it 
makes the understanding and application of the abstractions easier to 
grasp and apply.

http://halogen.note.amherst.edu/~jdtang/scheme_in_48/tutorial/overview.html


And from what I've read of Real World Haskell it looks like it should be 
quite good.


http://book.realworldhaskell.org.nyud.net/beta/


James




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