Get Programming with Haskell

This book does a lot to make Haskell accessible to the widest possible audience.It is suitable for beginners, and is highly recommended as a first book on Haskell. It is also suitable for use as a course textbook (given the exercises and solutions provided in it). It is very easy to read and understand, thus making the material very accessible, and removing the mystique of Haskell. It also has a very balanced and comprehensive coverage of the topic.This book also has a lot to teach about Computer Science in general; hence is recommended in order to make people better programmers (regardless the technology one must use).While the book is above average in its grammar, clarity, and lack of typos; I still marked up my book with a goodly number of typos.The discussion on HINQ (a Haskell version of Microsoft's LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is a general purpose query language) is very worthwhile and really showcases the types of problems that can be easily addressed by Haskell's expressive power.Manning: I love the cover art. Seriously! It is very apropos and beautiful (for both this Haskell book and the recent Manning F# book).I hope to see more titles from this author: he writes well, and is gifted at being able to stand back and answer the proverbial question: "What does the sum total of these disparate parts mean?".Here are some things that could make this book even better: description of how to use Visual Studio Code as an IDE for Haskell, and examples of GUI front ends for Haskell applications (using web technologies, and optionally using desktop technologies). Coverage of these topics would do even more towards making Haskell more accessible and viable to a wider audience.Good job!

I've tried to learn Haskell three or four times and none of the other tutorials clicked. I did nearly every exercise in this book and was able to write several useful programs, outside of the content of this book, for myself in Haskell. This is a fantastic reference for those who want to learn the concepts while also making workable programs.

I, too, have been ambivalent about tackling Haskell, because others have told me it is difficult to learn. And Haskell's central approach is functional programming, another not-so-easy topic. The author, Will Kurt, notes: "As a language, Haskell commits fully to [John] Backus's dream [of liberating programming 'from the von Neumann style'] and doesn't allow you to stray back to more-familiar styles of programing."Kurt also states that "[o]ne of the most frustrating issues for newcomers to Haskell is that basic I/O in Haskell is a fairly advanced topic. Often when new to a language, it's a common practice to print output along the way to make sure you understand how a program works. In Haskell, this type of ad hoc debugging is usually impossible. It's easy to get a bug in a Haskell program, along with a fairly sophisticated error, and be at an absolute loss as to how to proceed."That certainly happened to me when I first started doing this book's exercises and kept trying to jump around inside the book. "Get Programming with Haskell" is packed with focused topics, short code examples and short programs, plus numerous exercises to help stretch and strengthen your new knowledge. If you are a Haskell beginner, you really, really need to go through this book page by page, front to back, like a college textbook in a hard class where the professor keeps emphasizing, "Anything and everything in this book can be on the final exam."Will Kurt's book is well-written and well-structured, and it is heavily illustrated with short code listings that demonstrate specific points. He is an excellent ambassador for Haskell, and he is a good teacher. (At the back of his book, he's also an advocate for several other functional programming languages, including Clojure and F#, plus two languages that have even more powerful type systems than Haskell: Idris and Liquid Haskell. But learn Haskell first!)A lot of work clearly went into the creation of this book. As a rule, I generally don't (five-star) "love" programming books the way I (five-star) "love" a good novel, short story collection, poetry colletion or nonfiction work. But please consider my four-star review here as four and a half stars. I am enjoying the challenge of learning how to work in Haskell.(My thanks to Manning Books for providing an early reading copy.)

Similar to other reviewers, I tried and gave up learning Haskell twice.This book did the trick. The pace is right and includes good exercises/solutions.The way the author writes makes you want to code along with him.I am only halfway through and already I know enough to have written somepractical Haskell for work purposes (I'm an Electrical Engineer).One program was used to generate device config files. The other was acustom implementation of complex numbers/phasors.My other two attempts were with online tutorials which were eithertoo easy and didn't get you anywhere that practical or too hard and hadyou making parsers when you barely even knew what "map" did yet.

A good balance between practical and theoretical. It teaches you how to do useful things with Haskell while still explaining important concepts in depth.