Ground Up

[Keith Wansbrough]

Jerry writes:

> While my goals are:
> * Become a pragmatic haskell programmer in the shortest time
> * At the minimal expense
> 
> What I have done for the past few weeks were:
> * I read almost all the free educational sources at www.haskell.org, 
> * Subscribed to this mailing list and try to digest every mail
> * Read most of the "The Haskell School of Expression" (by Paul
>   Hudak) and the non-theoretical chapters of the "An Introduction To
>   Functional Programming Systems Using Haskell" (by AJT Davie), which
>   are the only two introductory level haskell related books in our
>   library

My advice would be to install GHC [*] or Hugs, and do all the exercises
from the Hudak textbook.  You can't learn to program by reading, you
only learn by actually writing programs.

Other than that, you could try reading the Haskell 98 Report to learn
about the language, and skimming the documentation for the libraries
to get an idea of what's available.  Again, you'll learn about the
libraries by using them, not by reading the docs - but you need to
skim at least the contents pages of the docs so you know what's out
there.

Haskell 98 Report:
  http://www.haskell.org/definition/
Haskell 98 standard libraries docs:
  http://www.haskell.org/definition/
Other Haskell libraries docs:
  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/book-hslibs.html

Hope this helps!

--KW 8-)

[*] If you use GHC, you'll probably find the interpeter (GHCi) easier
to use and better for experimentation than the compiler (GHC).