haskell

Haskell Programming from First Principles by Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki, better known as The Haskell Book, is a massive book. My copy runs around 1,200 pages, and I worked through all of it, exercises and all, minus a few at the very end. This was actually my second attempt. The first time I fell off somewhere around page 300, since the pace was slow and nothing in the book had me building things, so I lost momentum. This time I paired it with Learn Haskell by Example for projects and Learn You a Haskell as light reading on the side, and that combination is what got me through, with The Haskell Book building up the theory and Learn Haskell by Example giving me a wide variety of places to apply it. ...

Learn Haskell by Building a Blog Generator is a free online book that teaches Haskell through a single project, a small static blog generator. It’s short, around 150 pages if you export it to PDF, and that’s a big part of its appeal. I read it during a week when my laptop was in the shop, as a bounded, finishable side project to fill the gap while my main Haskell books (The Haskell Book and Haskell by Example) were on hold. ...

Learn You a Haskell (LYAH) is the friendly, illustrated, free online Haskell introduction that a lot of people start with. I read it as the third track in my Haskell study, alongside The Haskell Book for the deep theory and laws and Haskell by Example for project-driven practice, and I own it in print, mostly to support the author. LYAH ended up being my “medium” book. It wasn’t demanding enough to need my protected morning focus time, but it wasn’t throwaway reading either. It moves fast and covers an enormous amount of ground in relatively few pages, and it rarely gives you exercises, so it was easy to pick up between chapters of my heavier books, but I also retained less from it than from the books where I was typing and testing code. More than once I described it as a book where you’re lucky to keep anything, but you’ll recognize the topic when it comes up again somewhere else, and that turned out to be worth a lot, since plenty of concepts were already familiar by the time The Haskell Book covered them properly. ...

So, I haven’t been blogging for about ten years. To tell the truth, I spent all day programming, so when I got off work, I spent my time reading history or philosophy or anything else not computer related. I can see from my previous posts that I was experimenting with video and had started reading Agile Web Development with Rails. Well, I’m still a full stack web developer, so I could do worse than looking back at the web framework that really started it all. So I will read Agile Web Development with Rails 8 and get a taste of convention before configuration. That doesn’t really fit with the new title of the blog, but it’s still something I want to do, so I will get it done. I was interested in functional programming and different approaches to web development 10 years ago, and have never fully explored either, so I’m picking up where I left off with a slightly updated approach. ...