On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 17:01 +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen are pleased, and frankly, very excited to announce that were developing a new book for O'Reilly, on practical Haskell programming. The working title is Real-World Haskell.
The plan is to cover the major techniques used to write serious, real-world Haskell code, so that programmers can just get to work in the language. By the end of the book readers should be able to write real libraries and applications in Haskell, and be able to:
* design data structures * know how to write, and when to use, monads and monad transformers * use Haskells concurrency and parallelism abstractions * be able to write parsers for custom formats in Parsec. * be able to do IO and binary IO of all forms * be able to bind Haskell to foreign functions in C * be able to do database, network and gui programming * know how to do exception and error handling in Haskell * have a good knowledge of the core libraries * be able to use the type system to track and prevent errors * take advantage of tools like QuickCheck, Cabal and Haddock * understand advanced parts of the language, such as GADTs and MPTCs.
That is, you should be able to just write Haskell!
The existing handful of books about Haskell are all aimed at teaching programming to early undergraduate audiences, so they are ill-suited to people who already know how to code. And while theres a huge body of introductory material available on the web, you have to be both tremendously motivated and skilled to find the good stuff and apply it to your own learning needs.
The time has come for the advanced, practical Haskell book. Great, this surely meets a demand and I'll buy it, for sure.
Here's my wish list:
Heres the proposed chapter outline:
1. Why functional programming? Why Haskell?
2. Getting started: compiler, interpreter, values, simple functions, and types 3. Syntax, type system basics, type class basics 4. Write a real library: the rope data structure, cabal, building projects 5. Typeclasses and their use 6. Bringing it all together: file name matching and regular expressions 7. All about I/O 8. I/O case study: a DSL for searching the filesystem 9. Code case study: barcode recognition 10. Testing the Haskell way: QuickCheck 11. Handling binary files and formats 12. Designing and using data structures 13. Monads 14. Monad case study: refactoring the filesystem seacher 15. Monad transformers 16. Using parsec: parsing a bioinformatics format All great! 17. Interfacing with C: the FFI Number two on my wish list: interfacing with Java. Not because of the language, but the many libraries. For instance, there is a Java library to interface with the open document format, something I'd like to do. I know there is a Haskell Java interface, but it seems to be outside of
18. Error handling 19. Haskell for systems programming 20. Talking to databases: Data.Typeable Yes. 21. Web client programming: client/server networking 22. GUI programming: gtk2hs 23. Data mining and web applications 24. Basics of concurrent and parallel Haskell 25. Advanced concurrent and parallel programming 26. Concurrency case study: a lockless database with STM 27. Performance and efficiency: profiling 28. Advanced Haskell: MPTCs, TH, strong typing, GADTs 29. Appendices Number one on my wish list: maybe this will be covered in the chapters so far, but what about lazy versus strict? I understand the importance of laziness to define infinite lists and other data structures, but not
Compared to Erlang. While other functional languages are mentioned occoasionally on this list, Erlang is notably absent. This while the Erlang processes seem to be very useful, especially for concurrency and embedded systems programming. Is Haskell useful for embedded systems at all? the mainstream and hardly documented. Or am I wrong? the impact on performance and what to look out for when writing code. Similarly safe and unsafe and memoization. Could this be a separate chapter?
We're seeking technical reviewers from both inside and outside the Haskell community, to help review and improve the content, with the intent that this text will become the standard reference for those seeking to learn serious Haskell.
A critical note here. Before you can learn 'serious' Haskell you'll have to learn basic Haskell. I'm sure it is unintentional, but avoid any impression of superiority. Writing a good text book is very hard and very time consuming, and succesful communication with an audience is a separate skill. How about 'Applying Haskell' or something like that as the working title; what is the 'real world' anyway? But I'll be looking forward to the book, whatever its name! Regards, Hans van Thiel
If you'd like to be a reviewer, please drop us a line at book-review-interest@realworldhaskell.org, and let us know a little about your background and areas of interest.
Finally, a very exciting aspect of this project is that O'Reilly has agreed to publish chapters online, under a Creative Commons License! Well be publishing chapters incrementally, and seeking feedback from our reviewers and readers as we go.
You can find more details and updates at the following locations:
* The web site, http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/welcome/ * The authors, http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/about/ * The blog, http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/
-- Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen.