[Haskell-cafe] New book: Real-World Haskell!

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen are pleased, and frankly,
very excited to announce that were developing a new book for O'Reilly, on
practical Haskell programming. The working title is Real-World Haskell.

The plan is to cover the major techniques used to write serious,
real-world Haskell code, so that programmers can just get to work in the
language. By the end of the book readers should be able to write real
libraries and applications in Haskell, and be able to:

    * design data structures
    * know how to write, and when to use, monads and monad transformers
    * use Haskells concurrency and parallelism abstractions
    * be able to write parsers for custom formats in Parsec.
    * be able to do IO and binary IO of all forms
    * be able to bind Haskell to foreign functions in C
    * be able to do database, network and gui programming
    * know how to do exception and error handling in Haskell
    * have a good knowledge of the core libraries
    * be able to use the type system to track and prevent errors
    * take advantage of tools like QuickCheck, Cabal and Haddock
    * understand advanced parts of the language, such as GADTs and MPTCs.

That is, you should be able to just write Haskell!

The existing handful of books about Haskell are all aimed at teaching
programming to early undergraduate audiences, so they are ill-suited to
people who already know how to code. And while theres a huge body of
introductory material available on the web, you have to be both
tremendously motivated and skilled to find the good stuff and apply it
to your own learning needs.

The time has come for the advanced, practical Haskell book.

Heres the proposed chapter outline:

   1. Why functional programming? Why Haskell?
   2. Getting started: compiler, interpreter, values, simple functions, and types
   3. Syntax, type system basics, type class basics
   4. Write a real library: the rope data structure, cabal, building projects
   5. Typeclasses and their use
   6. Bringing it all together: file name matching and regular expressions
   7. All about I/O
   8. I/O case study: a DSL for searching the filesystem
   9. Code case study: barcode recognition
  10. Testing the Haskell way: QuickCheck
  11. Handling binary files and formats
  12. Designing and using data structures
  13. Monads
  14. Monad case study: refactoring the filesystem seacher
  15. Monad transformers
  16. Using parsec: parsing a bioinformatics format
  17. Interfacing with C: the FFI
  18. Error handling
  19. Haskell for systems programming
  20. Talking to databases: Data.Typeable
  21. Web client programming: client/server networking
  22. GUI programming: gtk2hs
  23. Data mining and web applications
  24. Basics of concurrent and parallel Haskell
  25. Advanced concurrent and parallel programming
  26. Concurrency case study: a lockless database with STM
  27. Performance and efficiency: profiling
  28. Advanced Haskell: MPTCs, TH, strong typing, GADTs
  29. Appendices

We're seeking technical reviewers from both inside and outside the
Haskell community, to help review and improve the content, with the
intent that this text will become the standard reference for those
seeking to learn serious Haskell. If you'd like to be a reviewer, please
drop us a line at book-review-interest at realworldhaskell.org, and let us
know a little about your background and areas of interest.

Finally, a very exciting aspect of this project is that O'Reilly has
agreed to publish chapters online, under a Creative Commons License!
Well be publishing chapters incrementally, and seeking feedback from our
reviewers and readers as we go.

You can find more details and updates at the following locations:

    * The web site, http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/welcome/
    * The authors,  http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/about/
    * The blog,     http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/

-- Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen.