Real World Haskell: Code You Can Believe In (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
This book worked me over pretty hard. It covers the functional programming language Haskell, emphasizing its usage in real world applications. It really did a phenomenal job at this, despite the several times I could barely stop myself from throwing it across the room. But I kept chugging through it, no matter how bad it hurt. I did give up on it once, but picked it up again a few days later and kept going.Many of the chapters I barely understood, but as the book progressed, they started feeling more familiar. That's the benefit of its real world approach. Its conceptual chapters are often followed by case study chapters. Sometimes it will use these case studies to introduce more concepts. I liked that it started with simple examples, and then only introduced complex concepts after the code became too unwieldy. This helped make sense of why these complex concepts are useful, and not just theoretical. Again, part of its "real world" approach.It's a long book, and covers a ton of subjects, including types, functions, recursion, folds, functors, applicative functors, monads, monad plus, monad transformers, I/O, typeclasses, regular expressions, JSON, testing, Parsec, Cabal, maps, lists, interfacing with C, error handling, systems programming, databases, GUI, networking, concurrency, profiling, sockets, CSV, and STM. Those are just the concepts! On top of that, it has several complex case studies, including searching a filesystem, parsing binary data, barcode recognition, a web client, a bloom filter, and a syslog client/server. So, yeah, I got plenty of opportunity to get used to the new ideas.But seriously, I wanted to strangle these authors sometimes. It's pretty disjointed. There are three authors, and it shows. Sometimes, it feels like a collection of tutorials. In some early chapters, difficult concepts are taken for granted, while later chapters belabor simple concepts. It's the former problem that annoyed me the most. If you overheard me as I read this book, you'd hear a lot of, "what the hell are you talking about?" "what does that even mean?" "did you just pull that function out of your ass?" I completely gave up all hope of even trying my hand at the exercises scattered throughout the book. Some of them are so challenging that they require a Ph.D. in computer science in addition to an in-depth knowledge of Haskell concepts the book never even mentions.And yet, I give this book five stars, for a few reasons. One is that the authors are bad asses. They know this language very intimately, and speak it fluently. Another is that it is ridiculously thorough. It's a tutorial, a cookbook, a guide to language tools, and a reference book, all in one. When I learned Ruby, I had to read a dozen books to really understand it, whereas I feel like I just need to keep studying this one book to get all I need to program in Haskell. Luckily, this book is also available for free online, so it will always be at my fingertips for my future reference. But the biggest reason this book gets five stars is the same reason I give any book five stars: it challenged me, it pushed me, and I grew from it. I could feel my mind shifting as I read it. I was merely intrigued with Haskell before this book, but now I'm absolutely hooked. After this book, I have a totally different attitude toward programming. Concepts are poorly explained, examples are confusing (sometimes broken). The website version of the book appears to have been abandoned by the authors too as none of the broken code/poor explanations have been updated.After hearing so much good stuff about Real World Haskell, I'm *really* disappointed with this book so far (Just finished chapter 10).Right now, I would recommend Learn You A Haskell instead (even though there are very little exercises).
What do You think about Real World Haskell: Code You Can Believe In (2008)?
This book is very hard to read but an excellent introduction to world of functional programming.
—kayle920
Much clearer and more immediately useful than Learn You A Haskell.
—lalaine34
I endorse this product and/or service.
—TheFlippedBird
