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

[Dan Weston]

What power animal have you chosen for the cover of your O'Reilly book? 
Alas, most of the good ones are gone already!

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
> 
>