Learn You a Haskell for Great Good

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
learnyouahaskell.com

To elaborate on why you shouldn't read (at least the online version of) Real World Haskell first: It has a lot of important topics that it covers that LYAH does not cover (like how to use cabal their package manager). But, it's not as good of a tutorial on the language and functional programming. It glosses over very complex topics, goes into a lot of depth on details that are not so important and worst of all, gives you some exercises that you aren't capable of answering yet. I tried learning Haskell three times from that book and gave up because it just killed my confidence.

Then I discovered LYAH. It explains things very simply and at a very good pace. If you want to learn Haskell and/or functional programming, I can't recommend it more. Imagine one of the Head First books without all the corny. The only thing I wish it had was exercises.

Now, once you have your feet wet, it's worth learning. Here's why:

- Pure(mostly) functional language. This is in opposition to Java & Ruby, which while having functional aspects are OO (Object Oriented). - It's okay not to know what a functional language is. It's making functions first-class citizens, such that a function becomes a value like any other. - Separates IO from computation. IO is inherently impure and unreliable, so functions are generally pure and instead wrap IO in containers. Obviously, programs would be less useful (still use in the compiler running!) without IO. - All of these concepts (and more) will change how you think about programming and make you a better programmer in all languages.

Haskell can be found in some backend stacks, the more notable examples I can think of are Mailrank (acquihired by Facebook) and Bump.

Personally, I've only done a limited number of projects with Haskell (a Postgres-backed beer API & IRC bot) but I've grown to respect it as a language and through limited exposure has made me love FP.