RWH is the first haskell book I bought after deciding that reading pages on a browser wasn't doing it for me... I bought it eight months ago and to be honest, it looks like I've owned it for years... it takes you from beginner level, and I have to say that it does a very good job at guiding you through the type system and onto IO, monads, parsec, the works. Some of the projects in the book are just awesome, not only in their execution but in the step-by-step explanation, for example the bar code reading and unix pipes projects are really well done. Kudos to RWH for that. Having learned Erlang and LISP did give me some advantages in that the concepts of higher order functions and pattern matching were already under my belt, along with guard clauses etc. If I could say one thing so far to beginners to haskell it would be two things: * learn to "read" type signatures * learn to "decipher" the type related error messages Everything else just comes naturally after practice. Practice. And more practice. A famous author once said "You get good at writing by reading, and writing lots." :)