Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

I'm currently working through this book. Overall it seems like a good introduction but I wish it had exercises at the end of each section. I learn best by working through specific problems.

What does "lack of applications" mean? As in, not that many apps are written in it, or that it's not applicable to many of them? It's a fairly general-purpose language, you can get most common programming tasks done in it pretty well.

I'd say it's pretty good. It's hard to give advice because I learned Haskell when I already had a decent college-student understanding of C++, so Haskell added diversity to my education where C wouldn't. It's good to learn languages that are different, and languages that make different things cheap -- Haskell made defining types and also made static type checking a lot cheaper than other languages in 2005. It's also easier to usefully learn than C, because I think you really need to do stuff with a language in order to be good at it, and floundering around as a noob in C isn't necessarily the best way to do that, it seems to me like you can learn ho to use it wisely, more productively, when coming from a background with some experience. You can do useful stuff with Haskell pretty quickly, which lets you go farther with it.