Hello Chris and thanks for your effort in making Haskell more understandable to everyone. I hope that you will be open to an opinion which differs from the many enthusiastic comments you usually receive.

I do not want to sound grumpy, but i need to say that i am not ecstatic about the idea of this book, so i hope that it will not become a sort of mandatory reference for the Haskell community.

I do not consider the book and its research effort a bad thing, but i value existing resources and processes used by the Haskell community to document the language and the related theory. I don't think that getting into the details is useful here, i just want to mention that someone might be not interested in this project, and i hope that the choice not to read the book will be respected in all Haskell's public fora.

I sincerely hope not to start a flame. You do not have to convince me, i might buy the book tomorrow. I just want to mention the risk to consider this very extensive and comprehensive work as the *only* or the *best* way to learn Haskell. This would take some precious diversity away from us.

I hope that most people will understand the spirit of this remark.

Cheers,

Francesco Occhipinti

2016-01-11 8:45 GMT+01:00 Christopher Allen <cma@bitemyapp.com>:

I'd been reticent in the past to announce the book on the mailing list, but it's pretty comprehensive now and we have enough ecstatic readers learning Haskell with it that I thought I'd share what we've been up to.

We're writing this Haskell book (http://haskellbook.com/) because many have found learning Haskell to be difficult and it doesn't have to be. We have a strong focus on writing it to be a book for learning and teaching - it's not just a reference or review of topics. Particularly, we strive to make the book suitable for self-learners. We think Haskell is a really nice language and learning Haskell should be as nice as using it is.

The new release puts the book at 26 chapters and 1,156 pages. You can track our progress here: http://haskellbook.com/progress.html

The latest release included parser combinators, composing types, and monad transformers.

My coauthor Julie Moronuki has never programmed before learning Haskell to work with me on this book. She has written about using the book to teach her 10 year old son as well - https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/teaching-haskell-to-a-10-year-old-day-1/

Julie has also written about learning Haskell more generally - https://superginbaby.wordpress.com/2015/05/30/learning-haskell-the-hard-way/

If you've been reading the book, please speak up and share your thoughts. We have some reader feedback on the site at http://haskellbook.com/feedback.html

We'll be looking for a press to do a print run of the book soon as it's about 80% done. If anyone has any pointers or recommendations on whom to work with, particularly university presses, please email me.

Cheers everyone,
Chris Allen

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