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Learn You a Haskell is now in print
- arespredator 16y agoIt's astonishing to me that a computer science student wrote such a good book. It's funny, witty, the drawings are great, and the author explains quite complicated concepts of functional programming very clearly. I've already read this book a year ago online, yet I'm still gonna buy it just to support the author.
- runevault 16y agoI went through a decent portion of it online a while back myself, and I ended up grabbing it during O'Reilly's funding drive for Japan both for that effort and to support the author. Of the Haskell tutorials/books I've read it made me feel like I was getting more out of it (main other one I read was RWH, which isn't bad but felt... dry? and was a tough push).
- Stormbringer 16y agoWasn't there some virtual pushing and shoving over whether this was just a gross rip-off of a python book? Or am I confusing it with another? (Nitpicks welcome for once, so long as you can provide a link to the thing I was thinking of :D )
- bonus500 16y agoit's kind of inspired by Why's ruby guide, because that's also a sort of funny-ish programming book with pictures, but i think our style is different enough.
- Stormbringer 16y agoI'm probably thinking of some other python inspired book then. Well done for making a contribution to the advancement of knowledge etc.
- frio 16y agoYou might be thinking of Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way", which started a spat between him and Mark Pilgrim over the best way to teach Python. It was also ripped off to make a Ruby version later, which Zed got pretty annoyed at (FWIW, the Ruby version basically replaced the Python examples with Ruby, while not changing the explanations - which were very much tied to Python). However, none of that has anything to do with Learn You a Haskell, which looks excellent and will probably mean I don't make my savings goal next week :<.
- krainboltgreene 16y agoZed Shaw wrote "Learn Python The Hard Way", and then E. Martin started to write "Learn Ruby The Hard Way", without asking permission to copy the text. There's a second book, started before LPTHW and LRTHW, called Learn You The Ruby, by me. But I haven't finished it :(
- happy4crazy 16y agoLYAH is fantastic. Lots of really beautiful material, and it's choke-on-your-coffee funny.
- vessenes 16y agoI'm learning haskell from him right now; totally enjoyable introduction to a new language, and functional programming. It won't be my only haskell book, but I'm glad it was my first!
- thurn 16y agoDoes this also mean that the online edition has been completed and there will be no future chapters?
- bonus500 16y agofor now!! but in the future who knows. people might want chapters that focus around making real useful stuff with the knowledge, so that's a possibility
- jedi_stannis 16y agoI would love a chapter on Monan Transformers. Its one concept I can't seem to wrap my brain around and a LYAH style chapter seems like the perfect thing to help me understand it.
- bonus500 16y agoyeah i thought of writing a chapter about monad transformers, but it didn't really fit in. if i do a second round of chapters monad transformers will definitely be there. otherwise, just come on into #haskell and ask about stuff and you'll quickly be elucidated!
- happy4crazy 16y agoYeah, me too--I'm actually thinking about writing my first blog post as a LYAH-level intro to monad transformers :) Here's an article that helped me understand them: http://www.grabmueller.de/martin/www/pub/Transformers.en.html http://www.grabmueller.de/martin/www/pub/Transformers.en.htm...
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- danieldk 16y agoI can now confidently recommend a book to Haskell-aspiring friends that is easy to read and incredibly fun at the same time. It will be on my bookshelf next to Land of Lisp.
- teaspoon 16y agoI think it could even be appropriate for an analytically minded non-programmer. I'm going to try it on my sister, who is a mathematician.
- silentbicycle 16y agoShe may like J (http://www.jsoftware.com/ http://www.jsoftware.com/), too.
- Stormbringer 16y agoWith respect to the interaction between programming and maths, I remember reading a while back about some computer science course where they found that a relatively simple maths test administered early on strongly predicted success at the end of the course, and it was mainly around algebra and variable assignments. I wonder if the 'procedural' languages are more strongly slanted towards the algebra style of maths, whereas 'functional' languages are more strongly slanted towards the formula style (or whatever we would call that maths where you talk about f of n, and g(f(n)) rather than the x squared plus 4x plus c style - not sure of nomenclature, many moons ago I took a course on 'Discrete' mathematics but couldn't adequately define what makes it different from other sorts of maths) My grossly inadequate labels aside, the point I'm getting at is that maybe depending on the type of maths they do, different mathematicians might be drawn towards different kinds of programming languages (or find them more or less 'natural'). What do you think?
- neutronicus 16y agoDoubt it. I think mathematicians are simply better at internalizing "this symbol stands for that concept" than other people, and this ability makes them good at both imperative and functional programming.
- rubergly 16y agohuh. I was just looking through No Starch Press's catalog last week after someone here mentioned the Manga Guide to Databases, and I saw this, but didn't realize it was only online before.
- oscilloscope 16y agoLYAH is fun and accessible. A great introduction to the advanced concepts in Haskell and the power of functional programming. It made me better at javascript and python. It rekindled my interest in math and algebras. It makes me want to do battle with complexity in nuanced, clever ways. Thanks Miran!
- bonus500 16y agohaha, thanks for reading. sometimes it's really cool to have something spark your interest and then it just snowballs from there
- revorad 16y agoThe same book is available for $25.56 on Amazon (vs $44.95 on No Starch and O'Reilly). How can Amazon afford such a huge discount on a new book? And how does O'Reilly survive with such competition?
- bonus500 16y agoit's a mystery! but i'd recommend buying it directly from No Starch because you get the free ebook and swag, plus more money goes directly into my mouth this way
- revorad 16y agoJust wondering, why didn't you choose to self-publish the book through Amazon or Lulu?
- bonus500 16y agoi just liked writing it and i put it online for people to red. it never really occurred to me that people might buy it until no starch approached me
- revorad 16y agoThat's great. I wish you much success.
- vessenes 16y agoThanks for your awesome book, I'm using it plus Project Euler right now to learn functional programming.
- jerf 16y agoNo Starch seems pretty aggressive on that recruiting front. I can't speak for them and of course I can't guarantee anything, but if anybody has an idea for a good, publishable technical book and the chops to write it, the threshold for pitching it to them seems to actually be negative, in that they will actually go around and proactively contact people.
- watmough 16y agoExcellent. Will order!
- rwmj 16y agoSlightly OT: Can someone point to a good, comprehensive tutorial on how to call C code from Haskell? Background: libguestfs Haskell bindings need a lot of love, and the FFI deeply confuses me.
- joelburget 16y agoI've been writing some ffi myself code lately. The real world haskell chapter on ffi has been helpful. They use a bit of hsc2hs on top of plain ffi. I've also been using c2hs which does a lot of the work for you (a bit higher level) and have found Edward Z Yang's guide helpful for that.
- pjscott 16y agoReal World Haskell is also online, by the way, so you can check out the chapter on FFI right here: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/interfacing-with-c-the-ffi.html http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/interfacing-with-c-the... It walks you through making some basic PCRE bindings, which is a big enough example that they manage to touch on the important issues. It's a pretty good introduction, I would say, especially in the part that covers interfacing C strings with ByteStrings.
- rwmj 16y agoI read this when I was doing the original porting and TBH it's very lightweight. Also (to reply to GP) c2hs is no use because we already have a very detailed and specific description of the interface, and a generator that does all the other bindings[1]. We want to know precisely how to translate our description into Haskell, we don't want to go through another layer. [1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=tree;f=generator;hb=HEAD http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=tree;f=generator;...
- ionfish 16y agoAside from the reading material others have suggested, I strongly recommend the #haskell channel on Freenode. The people there are extremely helpful and friendly.
- Cherad 16y agoJust bought this from No Starch Press for delivery to the UK. Amazon UK has it for £35.49, so cheaper to get it shipped over - madness! (I'll take my chances on the import taxes...) Thank you Miran for a great haskell book, I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on a print copy.
- tomazmuraus 16y agoAwesome book (+ pretty pictures). I have read it online about a year ago, but I still ordered my copy from Amazon.
- jlees 16y agoJust bought it. I'm researching ways to teach computer science and this has come up in so many threads it's not even funny. :) (Despite it being a free ebook I vastly prefer print, another problem I'm trying to figure out and solve...)
- squidsoup 16y agoHave you tried reading technical books on a Kindle DX? It's quite a nice experience.
- larsberg 16y agoThe slow pages turns are a killer. Especially with PDFs. "As shown in Figure N" for any value of N not on the current page was what basically killed the usefulness of the device for me.
- jlees 16y agoI don't have a DX, just an iPad, Xoom and 1st gen Kindle. But from those experiences, it's not the form factor that bothers me - it's the natural continuous access of the ebook format. I can't read PDFs onscreen for much the same reasons. When I read technical books, I scribble; I dog-ear; I add in postits everywhere; on textbooks, I even highlight and deface quite happily. And this helps me fix in my mind where reference information is: it's the green post-it in the corner. It's the page with the drawing of a dog in the top left. (I seem to have a very visual memory for recall.) I just cannot, no matter how hard I try, reproduce that experience on an e-reader. Yes, the features are mostly there, and search is a very nice bonus - it also works quite nicely for continuous following of tutorials - but the general way I consume these books just doesn't translate.
- olliesaunders 16y agoSome very light criticism of this book: sometimes the author makes things a little too easy by spelling out stuff that I’d rather have to work out myself. It’s easy to fall into the temptation of just reading and reading without really trying out what you’ve learnt because everything always seems so easy to understand but you don’t really internalize it properly until you’ve actually used it a lot. So these days I prefer other texts but I turn to LYAH when I’m really confused. All that said it is a great work, as many have said, and a great boon to Haskell and the functional programming world.
- losvedir 16y agoGreat guide! Since the author himself seems to be reading these comments, I finally have a chance to say just how hysterically funny the bit about analyzing the Avril Lavigne song line by line was. I laughed so hard when I got to that part. Guess I should buy the print version of the book to support the author....
- angrycoder 16y agoNo Starch has really been knocking out of the park lately with Land of Lisp, Eloquent Javascript, The Linux Programming Interface, and now Learn You a Haskell. They are also one of the few publishers who's typesetting doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out.
- krainboltgreene 16y agoAnd Learn You The Ruby is still in the dust. I feel so ashamed :(
- bonus500 16y agojust keep at it man!!!
- davelee 16y agoafter reading it online, I preordered it right away (last December). Had to get some money in Miran's account. Glad it's done and ready to go.
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- sigzero 16y agoKudos to the author on this book. I think it is great that Haskell will have such a "fun" book to teach the concepts of programming in Haskell. That should lower the learning barrier a bit. More so since everything is layed out in easy to understand terms.
- Calamitous 16y agoI'm curious how the author liked working with NoStarch. I know one of PragProg's big selling points is that they're much easier to deal with and provide much higher royalties than traditional tech publishers; I wonder if NoStarch has taken a similar approach.
- FreakLegion 16y agoI can't speak to how easy PragProgs is to work with, but it seems their 'much higher royalties' are just creative bookkeeping. Where other publishers base royalties on a book's gross, PragProgs uses net. They're somewhere between traditional and vanity publishing in that regard.