The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia

Best book for beginning functional programmers. Excellent explanations. The code is a little out of date, but not a problem for experienced developers. Examples are fun and engaging.

Informative with interesting examples. The guy who wrote chaired the committee that developed the language. I enjoy how he brings his insight into the language into the examples in the book.

I found this the most Haskell'ish of the Haskell books I have read; succinct, concise, compact, in fact, very much in the spirit of Haskell itself. The author's writing style is clear and distilled with very little redundancy. For these reasons I keep this small volume in a special place on my large shelf of programming language books. In agreement with other reviewers, this is not an optimal first Haskell book. The approach that worked best for me when ramping-up with Haskell was to use this text in combination with online tutorials and the O'Reilly "Real World Haskell" volume. This provided a good balance of essence, philosophy, coverage and practicality. This book might have been a good contender for the title of "The Joy of Haskell". I enjoyed it and will keep referring back in moments when I want to recapture core functional programming concepts that apply not only to Haskell but to the functional programming genre as a whole.

Amazing read makes you rethink writing programs in terms of expressions as oppose to variable mutation

Granted I am new to Haskell and to some degree functional programming. I thought this book would be really cool, pretty much an ideal book on a subject matter that I am very interested in. The text is definitely easy to follow for the most part, but WHY, WHY use a 'Times new roman' type font for the code samples? The code samples are basically in the same font as the text only in italics, making it hard to figure out what is supposed to be whitespace, which I find a pretty strange decision for a textbook on a language where layout matters...

C, Java, Pascal, Ada, and so on, are all imperative languages. They are "imperative" in the sense that they consist of a sequence of commands, which are executed strictly one after the other. Haskell is a functional language. A functional program is a single expression, which is executed by evaluating the expression. Anyone who has used a spreadsheet has experience of functional programming. In a spreadsheet, one specifies the value of each cell in terms of the values of other cells. The focus is on what is to be computed, not how it should be computed. This book is a unique attempt to teach the reader the Haskell programming language by demonstrating how to write programs that perform interesting tasks such as animation, graphics, robot control, and functional music composition. The book succeeds at introducing the reader to the Haskell language and the idea of functional programming, and the book is a fascinating read with unique projects performed in the Haskell language. This is particularly true if you are interested in multimedia programming. However, intermediate features of the language are brushed over. If you are already familiar with Haskell, this book will teach you interesting ways to look at functional programming and give you some ideas for some interesting projects. If you are new to Haskell, you are going to find yourself somewhat confused when you get to the more advanced material. I therefore recommend that you read this book along with "Haskell:The Craft of Functional Programming" by Thompson. That book is not nearly as interesting as this book, but it fills in all of the intermediate details that are missing in a very detailed manner.

in general, and if you don't know Haskell, OCaML, ML, or F#, then you really should buy this book and work through it. A generation ago, Abelson and Sussman wrote "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," which brought world-shaping clarity to programming in the form of a generic, functional approach. In the time since then, "types" and "lazy evaluation" have fundamentally improved that overall approach, and Haskell is the rightful successor to Scheme as the best-of-breed of functional programming languages. That said, types and lazy evaluation are somewhat tricky to learn, and this book offers a fun and easy way to do it. The software needed to run the samples in the book is free and works on Windows platforms (and possibly some others). Buy it, work through every word of it, you won't regret it :)

I already knew Haskell when I started reading this book, but it held my interest right through to the end. This is largely due to Hudak's choice of interesting application domains (graphics, animation, robotics, music) and how neatly applications in these domains can be expressed in Haskell. (As an advanced reader, I was particularly interested in the treatment of the design and implementation of his functional animation language.) More than just that, though, the book's success derives from a very nice blending of theory and practice. I especially liked his use of calculational reasoning as a approachable form of program proof. I highly recommend this book if you want to learn functional programming--tastefully--and have fun while doing it.