Re: [Haskell-cafe] recommendations for reading list?

2010/9/8 Benedict Eastaugh

2010/9/9 Николай Кудасов :

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Consider this book:

Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists (Foundations of Computing) -- Benjamin C.Pierce

Hi David,

Николай Кудасов is quite right--Pierce's book is excellent. Apart from being a good introduction to category theory, it's worth buying for the fourth chapter alone, which is an annotated bibliography of textbooks, introductory articles and reference works on category theory. It would be an excellent guide to where to go next after finishing Basic Category Theory.

Graham Hutton also taught a course on category theory at MGS 2010, and his slides are online. I found them quite enlightening, and they move at a good pace for a beginner, with an appropriate level of formality.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/cat.html

Category theorists tend to give lots of examples from abstract algebra, so a basic understanding of some algebraic structures is, I've found, a lot of help when trying to appreciate category-theoretic ideas.

Hope this helps a little.

Thank you Benedict, it does help a bit. I don't have really any significant exposure to abstract algebra either. I think that might help a bit. If only there was a resource like Khan's Academy for this stuff. (I don't think he goes in this direction for abstract math). Dave

Benedict.