Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Maybe the best choice for begginers in FP
Review: A very good introductory text for Functional Programming, witch uses the Haskell notation. Maybe made for those who came from some experiense in imperative languages, such as C or Pascal. Good examples, maybe not enough case studies. Another good reference is "Bird"

Rating:
Summary: An interesting introduction
Review: I read this book as my first book towards learning functional programming and Haskell specifically. With many years of (imperative and object oriented) software engineering behind me, the concept of functional programming was interesting.

The good parts of this book are that it is extremely well organized. It includes many helpful exercises (which I highly recommend) and a very good introduction (the first ten or dozen chapters).

Later on in the book, however, I found increasing difficulty. The author picks up the pace of the material without, in my opinion, justification. By the end, he covers what, from reading several other books and many online articles, I consider the most confusing topic in a single chapter or two. Reading it several times, I'm still uncertain how to build an I/O intensive program in Haskell, and/or what a Monad truly is and/or how exception processing is properly handled.

That notwithstanding (because it seems to be a fairly common complaint of new Haskell students) I quite enjoyed the book. Before you buy it, though, you may wish to consider books from Paul Hudak (a Yale professor and nice guy) and Richard Bird, both of whom have written on Haskell; Paul actually taught a class which I avoided back in the early 90s - too bad, too, because then I wouldn't have to start from scratch so many years later.

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Summary: Web site for Haskell text
Review: More details about the book can be found at http://www.ukc.ac.uk/computer_science/Haskell_craft/ and I can be mailed at [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: $48 down the drain
Review: My excitement to learn Haskell faded with every page turned. The Author presented the subject with such excitement comparable only to that of watching paint dry.

Rating:
Summary: Mediocre Material, Awful Typography
Review: This book may indeed be suitable for beginners in functional programming. Having had some previous exposure to FP, I found it very slow going, with tediously long discussion of trivial toy examples.

Aggravating these flaws is the typography, which is not just ugly, but dysfunctional: The font used for the unnumbered section headers is not sufficiently distinguished from the text font, so it is impossible to skip over the examples to new material being discussed.

Rating:
Summary: Good Haskell Book
Review: This book, in conjunction with other resources, is a good introduction to Haskell. http://www.haskell.org has a lot of guidance as well.

If you are like me and you are learning Functional Programming after many years of other styles of programming Haskell can be daunting. Books like this explain things from the fundamental levels to more advanced levels. If you read the introduction to the book you will see that it is natural to skip around chapter to chapter when it becomes appropriate to do so. Deciding when it's appropriate is going to depend on your goals. If you want to write full-blown applications in Haskell you may find yourself skipping around much earlier than someone who wants to cover the language completely.

Overall I find this to be a very good book but some of the exercises can be very difficult for someone new to Functional Programming. Almost anything worth doing is not easy though :).

Rating:
Summary: good selection of topics but need more detailed explanation
Review: This is generally a good book. But it has very little explantion of recursion for an introductory cs book. Since Haskell uses recursion exclusively, this is a severe shortcoming. And other concepts like partial application, folding, etc., are covered too briefly as well. However, the programs in the book are very clear and good.

Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Review: This was my first text on Haskell, and it certainly got me up to speed on all the essential elements. I prefer Hudaks text for most things, but there is no good reason not to own every Haskell book you can get your hands on. This book is especially strong on learning how to prove things about programs.

It doesnt get to Monads until near the end, but perhaps that is a good thing. It depends on what you want out of a text.

I used this text for self study, and it is well suited to such a task.