Avoid learning monads in the context of Haskell at all costs (unless you're a mathematician or into CS theory - my advice is for a competent programmer who want

Avoid learning monads in the context of Haskell at all costs (unless you're a mathematician or into CS theory - my advice is for a competent programmer who wants to get working understanding of monads as fast as possible), don't read about monadic laws and any other theoretic stuff. There are excellent explanations of monads for JavaScript, F#, Clojure and Erlang, to name a few. Pick one of them, for the language you're most familiar with. Avoid any syntactic sugar in the beginning. Avoid reading about Maybe/Option monad - it's too boring. Start with hand-crafted List monad, then go to State and/or Promise/Deferred monads, and then ignore State, Either, Writer and many more monads, which are either boring or only relevant in pure languages. Then start sugaring the syntax, `for` in Scala and "computational expressions" in F# are good for this, also LiveScript back-calls are passable. If you're into Lisps, then of course you have macros and it's a good exercise to write you own macros (of course, every Lisp out-there has many implementations already available to look at, if you're stuck). At this point you know enough to get back to Haskell and/or to look at monad transformers and Cont monad. You can also read about monadic laws and actually have an idea what they are about. It worked for me. I think the key to my method was to avoid reading about boring and/or not directly applicable things while constantly playing in a REPL with the interesting ones. I find it unbearable to learn theory of things I can't imagine being used. Once I use the "thing" a couple of times it changes and I can absorb theory pretty quickly.