Last night I was thinking on what makes monads so hard to take, and came to a conclusion: the lack of a guided tour on the implemented monads. Let's take the Writer monad documentation: all it says is: Inspired by the paper "Functional Programming with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism", Mark P Jones (http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/springschool.html) Advanced School of Functional Programming, 1995. SO WHAT? The best approach is the Part II of the "All About Monads" tutorial. There you have the almost ideal approach, except that the examples are just thrown there, with no step-by-step explanation. Of course one could copy, paste and run it, but this gives pretty much a "is it right?' feeling. Questions like "if a Reader is an application, why don't use a regular function instead?" or "what bind means for a State monad?". I will try to work on a "Part II" extended version on my vacations... maybe a WikiMonad... or MonadPedia... :-) After all, it is my duty as a haskell noob to write another monad tutorial! :D Cheers! -- Rafael Gustavo da Cunha Pereira Pinto Electronic Engineer, MSc.