[Haskell-cafe] ANN: "Real World Haskell", now shipping

[Andrew Coppin]

Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> Good evening -
>
> John Goerzen, Don Stewart and I are delighted to announce the
> availability of our book, "Real World Haskell". It is 710 pages long,
> and published by O'Reilly Media.
>   

You know, I *was* going to rush out and buy this as soon as it hit the 
shelves. I was really excited that this book was actually being made, 
etc. But then I sat and read some of it online, and the more I read it, 
the more I didn't like it. :-(

That sounds horribly negative when these guys have just spend I don't 
know *how* long perfecting the thing, and I feel like I ought to say 
something positive as well to make it sound less harsh. But... it all 
seemed a bit muddled to me. I thought chapter 1 was very strong, and the 
rest seemed to ramble from topic to topic. I was left feeling kinda 
disapointed.

Then again, one day I sat down and tried to draw a diagram of the 
essential concepts, techniques and syntax of Haskell and how they're 
related... The result looked like alphabet soup! It's not clear how you 
start to explain anything without immediately needing to explain 20 
other things you just used to explain the first thing. (Somebody 
commented "recursive tutorials for a recursive language". It was meant 
as an insult, but I actually kinda like it...) Given that that's the 
case, I'm not really sure that I could do any better than the Three 
Kings, so maybe I should just shuffle off and keep my comments to 
myself. :-/

What I *haven't* done yet is read the chapters where they try to claim 
that database programming is possible in Haskell. I'll have to do that 
at some point. Maybe this is where they reveal the Secret Formula that 
makes this stuff actually work properly... but somehow I doubt it.