On a related note, any recommendations for resources to help me wrap
my head around/understand the capabilities of Haskell?
That's a big question. For a general intro, I've heard good things about Learn You a Haskell [1], and of course Real World Haskell [2] was co-written by one of the creators of xmonad. Myself, I just learned through my usual combination of trial-and-error and perusing blogs, mailing lists, random bits of code, and the spec.
As for what your head needs wrapping around, I would need more information, but for many people the first barrier is the syntax, so... Lesson #1: function calls look like `f 1 2` instead of `f(1, 2)`. There is actually a good reason for this. Exercise: Find out what that reason is. Class dismissed.