I think this might be a good time to step back and make some general comments of my own. I learned Haskell in the summer of 2000. I see that that's exactly when SOE was published. I didn't have a copy. (I did acquire a copy of SOE about two years later, when I didn't need it anymore :-) I did have another book whose name I won't mention that I didn't find entirely helpful (I won't mention its name since I don't remember entirely for sure which book it was). I remember sitting in a windowless office trying to figure out why I couldn't seem to find any function that had the type IO a -> a. I'm thinking about that now because I hope to be able to not forget what it was like to be in that frame of mind. I'm sure SOE answers that question early on. But newbies on #haskell still ask it pretty often anyway. Obviously, there will always be people who don't know how to pick up a book, but on the other hand, I don't think that the problem of how to explain Haskell to beginners is solved yet. So the book that I want to write, hopefully with help from a few other people (maybe some of the people who've been contributing to the discussion so far, maybe others) would be aimed at a beginner (not a beginning programmer, but someone who's starting *perhaps* because they want to contribute to an open-source project that's written in Haskell, because there are such projects now that aren't Haskell compilers) who wants to get to the point where they can get real work done. And I'm not thinking of it as a textbook. Maybe this is way too ambitious. But I know that I managed to get from wondering where the IO a -> a function was to writing my own monad transformers, mostly by fumbling around in the dark, and I can't help thinking that there might be a possible book that would -- if not make it that much *easier* for somebody else to do the same -- at least allow *more* people to do the same. Cheers, Kirsten -- Kirsten Chevalier* chevalier@alum.wellesley.edu *Often in error, never in doubt "and the things I'm working on are invisible to everyone"--Meg Hutchinson