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The wikibook has gotten really good, and it's the reference I've started going to when I need a refresher on a concept, but HPfFP was the book that helped me ac
by djur 9y ago
The wikibook has gotten really good, and it's the reference I've started going to when I need a refresher on a concept, but HPfFP was the book that helped me actually "get" Haskell -- and I'd read pretty much every other beginner-to-intermediate resource by that point.
My experience has been that, generally speaking, programmers of language [X] don't have a particularly good grasp of what makes a good introduction to language [X], and I think that effect is even stronger with a difficult language like Haskell.
That said, I was about to read some of the new material in HPfFP, and I should also read the analogous wikibook content as an experiment. Thanks for linking it.
- eru 9y agoI do agree with your observation: I remember a particularly vivid example of some of my coworkers at Google suggesting the Go tutorial, starting at https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1 https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1, to someone completely new to programming. They couldn't even understand how it's not perfectly clear and simple. That being said the book that I've seen most success with getting someone from absolutely zero to "can start making progress on their own" is "How to Design Programs" (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/index.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/index.html). It helps that the authors regularly teach absolute beginners.