Thanks for this list. On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Benjamin L. Russell wrote:

One hint that is not (at least to my knowledge) listed on haskell.org is that, according to at least one user (see "The Programmers' Stone » Blog Archive » A First Haskell Experience" at http://the-programmers-stone.com/2008/03/04/a-first-haskell-experience/), the online tutorials can "confuse more than they illuminate."

Personally, I would recommend starting with one of the available books (see "Books - HaskellWiki" at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books), instead. In particular, I would recommend one of the following titles:

* Paul Hudak: The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2000, 416 pp, 15 line diagrams, 75 exercises, Paperback $29.95, ISBN 0521644089, Hardback $74.95, ISBN 0521643384. (See http://www.haskell.org/soe/.) - This book uses multimedia examples to motivate learning Haskell, and is extremely interesting to read. The one drawback I discovered was that some of the exercises assume trigonometry, which I had learned long ago but forgotten by the time I started reading this book. In my opinion, this book is to Haskell as SICP is to Scheme (i.e., it is the authoritative textbook on this subject).

* Kees Doets and Jan van Eijck: The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming, King's College Publications, London, 2004, 14.00 pounds or $25.00, ISBN 0-9543006-9-6. (See http://homepages.cwi.nl/~jve/HR/http://homepages.cwi.nl/%7Ejve/HR/ .) - While this book approaches Haskell from a proof-oriented, mathematical perspective guided toward proving program correctness, it assumes only elementary mathematics and is very easy to approach. Personally, I found it much easier to follow than any of the existing online tutorials.

Another tip is to write your own version of Towers of Hanoi (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi) in Haskell. Writing your own original programs is usually a much quicker road to mastering a programming language than just reading books, because it forces you to think in the target programming language.

Benjamin L. Russell

--- On Thu, 5/8/08, Ambrish Bhargava wrote:

...

From: Ambrish Bhargava Subject: [Haskell-cafe] I am new to haskell To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Date: Thursday, May 8, 2008, 1:37 PM Hi All,

I am new to Haskell. Can anyone guide me how can I start on it (Like getting binaries, some tutorials)?

Thanks in advance.

-- Regards, Ambrish Bhargava_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

-- Regards, Ambrish Bhargava

On 08/mag/08, at 08:59, Benjamin L. Russell wrote:

One hint that is not (at least to my knowledge) listed on haskell.org is that, according to at least one user (see "The Programmers’ Stone » Blog Archive » A First Haskell Experience" at http://the-programmers-stone.com/2008/03/04/a-first-haskell- experience/), the online tutorials can "confuse more than they illuminate."

Personally, I would recommend starting with one of the available books (see "Books - HaskellWiki" at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/ Books), instead. In particular, I would recommend one of the following titles: […]

What’s your opinion on Programming in Haskell by Graham Hutton. It is the first book about Haskell that I’ve read and wondering what could be the next one. Should I wait for Real world Haskell or do you think that the books you listed offer something new/different/more advanced than Programming in Haskell? Thank you in advance -- Giorgio Valoti

--- On Fri, 5/9/08, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:

Hello Giorgio,

Friday, May 9, 2008, 10:40:47 AM, you wrote:

...

be the next one. Should I wait for Real world Haskell or do you think that the books you listed offer something new/different/more advanced than Programming in Haskell?

i recommend you to read papers from the http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Learning_Haskell page, in particular those in Advanced tutorials, Monads, Type classes, Popular libraries sections

That is one idea. Also, since The Haskell School of Expression (http://www.haskell.org/soe/), by Paul Hudak, is sometimes regarded as easier to read as a second book on Haskell, you could read that, too. A more interesting suggestion, depending on your interests, is to find a specific interesting paper and do follow-up reading to understand that paper's topic better. For example, a few months ago, I was reading a paper, "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class" (http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/history.pdf), by Paul Hudak, John Hughes, Simon Peyton Jones, and Philip Wadler. While reading this paper, I encountered multiple references to a "Hindley-Milner type system," which apparently formed the basis for Haskell's type system, and wanted to learn more about this. A reference in the bibliography of the above paper pointed to "A theory of type polymorphism in programming," by Robert Milner, which unfortunately I was unable to find online. Further investigation led to a doctoral dissertation, "A General Framework for Hindley-Milner Type Systems with Constraints" (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/sulzmann00general.html), by Martin Sulzmann. Being new to type theory, I had some difficulty in understanding this paper, so I sent a question by e-mail to the author. He wrote back a rather terse reply suggesting that I go read the book "Types and Programming Languages" (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/) by Benjamin Pierce, adding that then I might better be able to understand his paper. Fortunately, the Wikipedia entry for "Type inference" pointed to Chapter 22 of that huge book. This dramatically reduced the amount of relevant reading. However, the book is very heavy, and was unavailable at the library when I wanted to borrow it. I plan to purchase that book in the near future. Some other suggestions for relevant papers not mentioned in "Learning Haskell - HaskellWiki" that I have found interesting are the following: * A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming, by Philip Wadler http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf This paper describes advantages of KRC, a predecessor to Miranda, itself a predecessor to Haskell, over LISP. * Wearing the hair shirt: a retrospective on Haskell (Microsoft PowerPoint presentation), by Simon Peyton Jones This paper describes the evolution of Haskell, and describes some advantages of Haskell over other programming languages. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/haskell-retrospective/HaskellR... * Archived e-mail message by Roger Hindley explaining the history of type inference (c/o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference#Hindley.E2.80.93Milner_type_infe...) http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/types/archives/1988/msg00042.html This short (one-page) e-mail message describes the history of the Hindley-Milner typing algorithm. Also, you may wish to attend an academic conference related to Haskell. For example, recently, I attended "Continuation Fest 2008" (http://logic.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/Continuation2008/) on continuations. There, I met an Assistant Professor from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. During the conference dinner afterwards, I was able to ask him to help me figure out how to write Towers of Hanoi in Haskell. In addition, I met some local researchers who gave me information on attending a monthly Haskell study meeting. Benjamin L. Russell