Programming in Haskell

This is an amazing introduction to the language with a good mix of simple problems and exercises to flex what you've learned. Learn You a Haskell may be the best first book but this is the one I recommend as a follow up.

Hutton's book is an excellent introduction for programmers approaching Haskell for the first time. Hutton keeps the focus on the core concepts of the language and avoids the advanced topics (of which there are many). The book is fairly light at 171 pages, but for an introductory text I consider this appropriate - a weighty tome might intimidate a reader who just wants a introductory overview. That said, if you are already an intermediate level Haskell hacker, you will likely not find anything of use in this text.

This is a solid start to grasping Haskell. The first 7 chapters are good, detailed and informative with examples and exercises that are helpful and correct. In Chapter 8, the wheels sort of come off the book with text examples that don't work and extremely important information (Monads) that get glossed over with a sentence or two about purity. Unfortunately, when the detailed example in the chapters didn't work I wandered to the solutions that you can download from the site and realized that the part that was glossed over (Monads) are critical to getting the solutions to work. This sort of gap occurs in other places in the book (the Chapter 11 countdown program can't actually work without declaring "Show" instances, etc ...). Nonetheless, rather than define the book for the gaps, I do feel like it is another solid intro to programming in Haskell but nowhere near enough to send a programmer on their way independently. Coupling the book with one of the other two texts is a good idea (Learn You a Haskell ... or the O'Reilly book).

I used this book in conjunction with "Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" and found it to be a good compliment to learning Haskell. Very interesting programming technique.

I have been a software developer for the past 12 years. However, I had always worked with imperative languages. Learning Haskell is not an easy task. Mostly because it takes time to assimilate the functional paradigm, and secondly because the learning material is not very well organized. It has been practically impossible to learn Haskell using a single book, and I have bought many. However, if I had to recomend a place to start, I would certainly say it is "Programmming in Haskell". The book covers the very basics that everyone new to Haskell and new to functional programming needs to understand. However, the book does not cover material enough to become a Haskell developer. It just covers enough to get you started with the language, and most importantly, to enable you to understand other Haskell books out there, which on the contrary, seem to assume that one has a broader understanding on functional programming. The reason I gave it 4 starts instead of 5 is because it uses a strange symbology in the examples which forces the reader to interpret the symbols when writing Haskell code. You have to read an appendix to interpret symbols as actual Haskell operators.

This is a fantastic introduction to both Haskell and functional programming in general. I highly recommend it.

I just started to dig into this book, and am very disappointed for a few reasons. A book that purports to teach a programming language should stick to best practices, yet the first example I read ("game of life") employed a busy-wait loop to slow down the example program. This is a very bad practice, and would earn a computer science student a stern lecture were they caught doing it. It really shakes my faith in the competence of this book's author. Also, why on earth, rather than using the actual ASCII characters required by the Haskell compilers, does the book use the mathematical symbols they represent in example code? Did the author feel the need to demonstrate his expert understanding of his word processing software? How many hours will be wasted by novice users looking for the "lambda" key on their keyboards? I strongly recommend waiting for the book "Real World Haskell" - you can already read much of it online while you wait for the printed version.

I found this small book a good introduction to functional programming in Haskell, and covers basic concepts such as functions, lists, recursion, lazy evaluation. However, it covers monads only cursory and lacked practical examples. For example, it only showed small snippets of Haskell code without some nice applications or coverage of tools about running, testing, debugging programs. I found a beta version of another book on the web at [...] much easier because it actually shows examples in GHC. I am still looking for a bit more advanced reference for Haskell and hope Simon Peyton-Jones writes some book on it.