Kirsten Chevalier wrote:
There's also excellent Haskell documentation available on the web already, but people like to buy books and they like to have an artifact that they can hold in their hands without getting laser printer toner all over themselves.
It also helps to collect and edit. Wiki's collect a lot of info, but they are often poorly organized and hard to search. I've always thought this book should be called ``Haskell for Hackers''. I've been collecting guidelines for some time. Here are a few: * The introduction should have some compelling arguments and examples about why someone should bet their business on functional programming. An important focus should be the rise of dual- and quad-core processors, emphasizing the potential for good libraries and compilers to leverage these effectively. * Each and every bit of syntax should be explained in plain language and these explanations should be typeset like theorems, numbered and offset from the rest of the text. The explanations should only use words and concepts that are known to all imperative programmers, or terms that have already been carefully introduced and defined. * Each code fragment should be explained in plain language. Quite often Haskell literature explains something in terms of Haskell, which is fine if you already know Haskell, but maddening if you don't. * IO must be introduced and used in the first chapter. Experienced programmers are not willing to wait until page 327 for some hint about how to replace printf. That doesn't mean that the first chapter will be all about monads, either, just some basics of how to perform IO along with some examples. * Examples should generally be pulled from the imperative literature, not the functional. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_unix_tools is a good example. * Alternatives to lex/yacc, shell programming, perl regular expressions and awk/perl style text processing must be covered.