On 12/12/06, Brian Hurt
Greetings, all. I'm an experienced Ocaml programmer, looking to broaden my horizons yet further and pick up Haskell, and I'm wondering if there's a good introduction to Haskell for me.
I think that O'Caml programmers would be one audience where I'd start with the "Gentle Introduction" (It's doesn't seem nearly gentle enough to the imperative-minded, but should be fine for someone used to functional programming). http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/ You're likely to find YAHT boring, but I think it may still be a good idea to skim it a bit. Also, you might like reading some specialised tutorials directly. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction_to_IO -- a brief 5 minute introduction I wrote about how we think about IO in Haskell. My favourite monad tutorials: http://www.nomaware.com/monads/html/index.html -- This is really thorough and mostly very well written, though there are places where the examples are both highly contrived and hard to comprehend due to excessive use of the continuation monad. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Monads_as_containers -- this one I wrote myself, and takes a somewhat different approach to things than most others, treating monads as an abstraction of container types rather than of types of computation. These are just some of my personal recommendations, but there's a lot of stuff that's out there. There are some decent guides to what's available on the wiki: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books_and_tutorials http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers -- There's actually quite a lot of introductory material in papers, because writers often can't assume that their audience is intimately familiar with Haskell already, though they may assume a certain level of familiarity with CS in general. Also, make sure you fire up an IRC client and join us at #haskell on irc.freenode.org. There are lots of friendly people there who are always happy to discuss things, answer questions (don't worry if they seem simple), and point you at resources. Welcome to the list and have fun learning Haskell! - Cale