[Haskell-cafe] New release of the book Haskell Programming from first principles

[Francesco Occhipinti]

Hello Chris and thanks for your effort in making Haskell more
understandable to everyone. I hope that you will be open to an opinion
which differs from the many enthusiastic comments you usually receive.

I do not want to sound grumpy, but i need to say that i am not ecstatic
about the idea of this book, so i hope that it will not become a sort of
mandatory reference for the Haskell community.

I do not consider the book and its research effort a bad thing, but i value
existing resources and processes used by the Haskell community to document
the language and the related theory. I don't think that getting into the
details is useful here, i just want to mention that someone might be not
interested in this project, and i hope that the choice not to read the book
will be respected in all Haskell's public fora.

I sincerely hope not to start a flame. You do not have to convince me, i
might buy the book tomorrow. I just want to mention the risk to consider
this very extensive and comprehensive work as the *only* or the *best* way
to learn Haskell. This would take some precious diversity away from us.

I hope that most people will understand the spirit of this remark.


Cheers,
Francesco Occhipinti


2016-01-11 8:45 GMT+01:00 Christopher Allen <cma at bitemyapp.com>:

> I'd been reticent in the past to announce the book on the mailing list,
> but it's pretty comprehensive now and we have enough ecstatic readers
> learning Haskell with it that I thought I'd share what we've been up to.
>
> We're writing this Haskell book (http://haskellbook.com/) because many
> have found learning Haskell to be difficult and it doesn't have to be. We
> have a strong focus on writing it to be a book for learning and teaching -
> it's not just a reference or review of topics. Particularly, we strive to
> make the book suitable for self-learners. We think Haskell is a really nice
> language and learning Haskell should be as nice as using it is.
>
> The new release puts the book at 26 chapters and 1,156 pages. You can
> track our progress here: http://haskellbook.com/progress.html
>
> The latest release included parser combinators, composing types, and monad
> transformers.
>
> My coauthor Julie Moronuki has never programmed before learning Haskell to
> work with me on this book. She has written about using the book to teach
> her 10 year old son as well -
> https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haskell-to-a-10-year-old-day-1/
>
> Julie has also written about learning Haskell more generally -
> https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/learning-haskell-the-hard-way/
>
> If you've been reading the book, please speak up and share your thoughts.
> We have some reader feedback on the site at
> http://haskellbook.com/feedback.html
>
> We'll be looking for a press to do a print run of the book soon as it's
> about 80% done. If anyone has any pointers or recommendations on whom to
> work with, particularly university presses, please email me.
>
> Cheers everyone,
> Chris Allen
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20160112/9f869d5f/attachment.html>