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Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

learnyouahaskell.com

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Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#71

Post by thanatropism »

myegorov wrote: post #61
oalessandr wrote: post #19

Another good (imho better) option is the Haskell book https://haskellbook.com/

Not to start a flame war, but imho this is my definition of a "terrible book". Of the everything and the kitchen sink variety. By contrast, I very much enjoyed LYAH, not least for its self-effacing humor. Hutton was too dry for me. There's a less well-known "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" book by Richard Bird that is concise and targets the mathematically inclined crowd.

He of functional programming with bananas etc.?

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#72

Post by andrepd »

ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Agreed. Personally I hate these kinds of books. This style, long-winded "cheery" explanations, constantly "playful", as if I was a small child that couldn't hold my attention for 2 minutes before you had to dangle a colourful toy in front of me. Like they're afraid to be serious for a moment (so many exclamation marks). I'm not here for humour, or to have a pleasant conversation. I'm here to learn. Just give me clear and concise, with minimal fluff.

If anyone is familiar with it, Landau and Lifschitz is my kind of book ;)

EDIT: I've just skimmed the Hutton book. It looks great! That's what I mean. You don't have to be dense or incomprehensible or dry. Just stick to the point and explain as clear and concise as possible.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#73

Post by lrc »

nanook wrote: post #67

What do people think of Real Word Haskell ( http://book.realworldhaskell.org/ ) ?

It's what I learned with. I thought it was pretty good, but I haven't tried any others. It gets you started, and seems best for a reader who knows a few other languages.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#74

Post by reificator »

leshow wrote: post #37
reificator wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got LYAH in a Humble Bundle and didn't make it very far before getting bored and dropping it. I've used Rust, SML, and a bit of Scala so I don't feel like it should be that difficult to pick up Haskell. Next time I get the urge, I'll try Hutton's book.

It probably won't be for you. I was picking up Rust in 2015 and my prior Haskell knowledge (just past beginner at the time), helped immensely. There's a good deal of crossover for the broad concepts.

Yeah SML helped a lot while learning Rust for the same reason.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#75

Post by 3rdAccount »

sevensor wrote: post #9
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #2

I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…

I've bounced off LYAH more than once because it spends so much time in the REPL. I'm not interested in the REPL as an end in itself, only insofar as it can help me develop an actual program. Outside of image-based environments, what you do in the interactive shell doesn't reflect how actual code gets written. It feels trivial, and it doesn't help you build up a library of examples to refer back to later.

This bothered me too. I use a REPL everyday, but you have to know how to write full programs too.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#76

Post by bor0 »

ghayes wrote: post #18
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #2

I tried LYAH before I had any real functional experience, and it went poorly. I think I wasn't dedicated enough. I took a programming languages class taught in Racket, and by the end of that semester I felt like I had finally "gotten" what functional programming was all about. Tried LYAH again and... it still didn't quite stick. Not sure why. But I was determined, because I'd heard about Haskell so much on the intern…

I really enjoyed programming in Elm as a starting point. Elm avoids type-classes, which tend to be the biggest hurdle when starting to learn Haskell. Plus, you can design a nice web app in the process (versus, say, process CSV files). After I became comfortable with Elm, learning Haskell, type-classes, lazy evaluation, etc., made significantly more sense to me. For instance, `do` syntax is great, but it's not obvious…

Learning Idris will definitely alter the way you think about programming and make you a better programmer, even if you don't program in it on a daily basis.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#77

Post by sridca »

ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Hutton's book followed by something like https://intermediatehaskell.com/ should do the trick.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#78

Post by sridca »

oalessandr wrote: post #19

Another good (imho better) option is the Haskell book https://haskellbook.com/

I read more than half of this book, and sadly I did not enjoy it at all. Read it only if you enjoy long-winded verbose explanations. Hutton's or Bird's is concise yet explanatory.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#79

Post by creichert »

ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

> Terrible book.

Definitely overstated and not good advice for beginners.

My advice to beginners would be:

- Read all the Haskell books available at your disposal. (In addition to LYAH and the Hutton book, I would say Learning Haskell From First Principles and Get Programming with Haskell are great, https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-haskell, http://haskellbook.com/)

- When you hit something that doesn't make sense in one source, try referencing it in another source.

- When you have some experience writing programs in Haskell, refer to some older books like Real World Haskell. There may be a few issues compiling the examples, but nearly all the techniques in the book are still widely used and you learn about the language has progressed in the last few years. This gives you a compass to read and maintain older Haskell source code).

- Read as much Haskell code as you can from popular libraries (Pandoc, XMonad, and smaller libs as well).

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

#80

Post by Kenji »

ilovecaching wrote: post #11

Terrible book. Please, please read Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. LYAH is full of incorrect definitions and broken analogies. Hutton on the other hand is up there with K&R for clear and concise definitions.

Agreed. I tried to learn Haskell with this book. I can program basic things in Haskell but this book caused more confusion than anything else.
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