What helped me understand monads was starting from the notion of 'promise' (or future), and how you can chain those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_p

What helped me understand monads was starting from the notion of 'promise' (or future), and how you can chain those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises. Once you have that concept it is easier to now learn what a monad is in the scope of a monadic concurrency library. Similarly learning about the either monad might be easier if you start from the concept of chaining error handling, as in this tutorial: http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/ http://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/recipe-part2/, and then show how it can be done with monads. But I agree with the 'monad tutorial fallacy' that you'll only learn it once you actually try to write code using it and see if it works the way you thought it would.