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Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

learnyouahaskell.com

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Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#11
What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it.

Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#12

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

Well, Learn You a Haskell's explanation of Monads in Haskell seems alright.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#14

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

There was quite a long discussion about this on the Haskell subreddit this past week[1], and indeed this topic seems to always be something newcomers get caught up with.

My advice is to use the language until you gain an intuition for them. Despite being rather simple, I found it was difficult to fully appreciate them without a decent amount of exposure. Really though, monads aren't what Haskell is all about, and don't let an incomplete understanding of them stop you from diving in.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2vm0ed/is_there_a_g...

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#15
post #4

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.

Word.

There's Real World Haskell by Don Stewart (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/index.html), though the order of exposition is different and your mileage may vary with the exercises.

I did find that "Programming in Haskell" by Graham Hutton was a very clear read and had good programming exercises.

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#16

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

I recommend this to anybody who wants to learn about Haskell's important data types:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#17

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

I have seen a few monad tutorials and found this series far more comprehensible than others-- it starts with the real-world monads many programmers use unknowingly and works back to the definition. http://ericlippert.com/2013/02/21/monads-part-one/

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#18
This book was excellent for helping me learn Haskell, but the gendered language and fat-shaming jokes made me feel very uncomfortable, eg:

"You're fat! Lose some weight, fatty!","You're supposedly normal. Pffft, I bet you're ugly!" and "You're a whale, congratulations!", "Sure, we could just type them all out but obviously that's not a solution for gentlemen who demand excellence from their programming languages."

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#19

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

I highly recommend watching Tom Stuart's talk "Refactoring Ruby with Monads":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1jYlPtkrqQ

Re: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (2008)

#20

What is a good online reference to learn about "Monads" for beginners? Someone posted a reference here on HN sometime ago but I lost it. Edit: The book was enjoyable and a delight to read, but I started struggling to keep up from Chapter 8. as it went into Monoids and Monads, I feel like I need to read other tutorials before coming back to it.

The original monad papers, by Philip Wadler. Accept no substitutes.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/monads.html

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/

Alternatively, if you really are allergic to LaTeX, or beards, the recently Oscared sigfpe’s “You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)”

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

There are no other monad tutorials. Just forget about them.

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