As I mentioned in my parent comment, I didn't finish to read the book yet. Surely, other people (like jrockway) who have completely read the book may give you a

As I mentioned in my parent comment, I didn't finish to read the book yet. Surely, other people (like jrockway) who have completely read the book may give you a better review, but since you asked, here are my 0.02$: Disclaimer: I only worked with imperative programming languages before starting to learn Haskell for great good. The book's written pretty well; the explanations of various constructs introduced either by the language itself or by the functional programming paradigm are written pretty detailed. Moreover, the explanations are accompanied by a lot of code examples, which helps you understanding everything much better. It also has whole chapters dedicated to implement something, like chapter 5, where you'll develop a library for working with JSON data. It's not only theory; you won't be only reading about all the library functions, types, classes, and whatsoever Haskell provides; you'll be using the things you've learned in previous chapters to implement something; you'll learn how to use Haskell in the real world, as some people might say :) If you're not all that convinced, and first want to have a look at some chapters, you can read the book online for free (Brownie point: the comments there are sometimes interesting to read, too): http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read