Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
Good evening -
John Goerzen, Don Stewart and I are delighted to announce the availability of our book, "Real World Haskell". It is 710 pages long, and published by O'Reilly Media.
You know, I *was* going to rush out and buy this as soon as it hit the shelves. I was really excited that this book was actually being made, etc. But then I sat and read some of it online, and the more I read it, the more I didn't like it. :-( That sounds horribly negative when these guys have just spend I don't know *how* long perfecting the thing, and I feel like I ought to say something positive as well to make it sound less harsh. But... it all seemed a bit muddled to me. I thought chapter 1 was very strong, and the rest seemed to ramble from topic to topic. I was left feeling kinda disapointed. Then again, one day I sat down and tried to draw a diagram of the essential concepts, techniques and syntax of Haskell and how they're related... The result looked like alphabet soup! It's not clear how you start to explain anything without immediately needing to explain 20 other things you just used to explain the first thing. (Somebody commented "recursive tutorials for a recursive language". It was meant as an insult, but I actually kinda like it...) Given that that's the case, I'm not really sure that I could do any better than the Three Kings, so maybe I should just shuffle off and keep my comments to myself. :-/ What I *haven't* done yet is read the chapters where they try to claim that database programming is possible in Haskell. I'll have to do that at some point. Maybe this is where they reveal the Secret Formula that makes this stuff actually work properly... but somehow I doubt it.