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Thinking Functionally with Haskell – Richard Bird's New Book

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Re: Thinking Functionally with Haskell – Richard Bird's New Book

#5

Post by chollida1 »

For those of you who aren't familiar with the author's other works, it's worth taking a peek at his other books.

I can whole heatedly recommend Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ric...

It's a good cross between two other excellent books:

- Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp/...

and

- Chris Okasaki's Purely Function Data Structures http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka....

If you haven't read all three, its well worth your while to do so!

And of course if you are going down the rabbit hole of reading Perls of Functional Algorithm Design then you need to read the "how to read Pearls of Functional Algorithm design" as well.

http://www.atamo.com/blog/how-to-read-pearls-by-richard-bird...

Re: Thinking Functionally with Haskell – Richard Bird's New Book

#6

Post by KobaQ »

Ok, I'm not a big fan of ads here at Hacker News, but actually you kind of proved me wrong as I'm genuinely curious and very tempted to give it a try :-). It looks like a book that could help me become a better dev. I'd probably be using FP via F# at the end of the day, but it's more about the FP mindset, that I think I still don't have.

Anyway, buy it somewhere else! (I will do ...). I know, Amazon is super cheap and convenient, but we need competition and diversity.

Re: Thinking Functionally with Haskell – Richard Bird's New Book

#7

Post by T-R »

akurilin wrote: post #3

What is this book's specific niche compared to all the other Haskell books out there?

Just taking a quick glance through the table of contents, it looks like it aims to focus more on "how to think about problems in this paradigm" (as the title implies) than the more practically-oriented "let's go write fizz-buzz" approach. For example, it jumps into function composition before it even talks about how to use GHCi. It has a chapter called "Proofs", and it seems to have a chapter focusing on using lazy evaluation to trade off time and space consumption.

Glancing at the text available, it doesn't seem to make any references to other programming languages, and takes an approach of "let's build this up from the things you learned in Math class". Seems like it might be a good fit for someone with more math than programming background, or someone with enough programming experience that they want to get to the heart of what functional programming is, but a bit jaded by the usual language tutorial format.

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