Haskell From The Very Beginning

Author: John Whitington
Publisher: Coherent Press
Pages: 214
ISBN: 978-0957671133
Print: 095767113X
Kindle: B07YYN2BQ8
Audience: would-be Haskell developers
Rating: 4
Reviewer: Kay Ewbank

As a functional language, Haskell takes a different approach to programming to most other languages. This book aims to teach you how it works.

The book makes no assumptions about programming knowledge, so starts off from the very basics of entering a Haskell command to carry out an arithmetic sum. The author, John Whitington has experience of  teaching programming to students on the Foundations of Computer Science course at the UK University of Cambridge, and this practical background shows through in the approach he takes.

 

Banner

The opening chapter is followed by another scene setter on names and functions before moving onto the main subject matter of the book with chapters on writing and using Haskell scripts, and introducing pattern matching and lists. 

The book continues with chapters on sorting, functions, errors, keys, the data types, trees, and real numbers. A chapter on being lazy introduces the idea of repeats, after which the author goes on to input and output, and building bigger programs, and the book ends with a chapter on the standard prelude and base.

 

Throughout the book, chapters end with a set of questions to ascertain whether you've understood the chapter topic, and a 'So Far' section with thumbnail descriptions on everything you ought to know by this point in the book.

This is a hard book to sum up. I often think authors spend too much time on the concepts of a programming language, and not enough time on the practicalities. In some ways this book goes too far the other way; I'd have liked more preamble in the chapters telling me the big idea. I do admit that much of my 'bits missing' feeling is probably down to the fact that as a polymorphically-statically-typed, lazy, purely functional language Haskell just does things differently. Interestingly, despite my caveats, I'm pretty sure that if I worked through all the examples, rather than just reading the book, I could come out as someone who could write Haskell programs, and that's pretty much all you can ask of a book about programming in a new language.

If you're planning on learning Haskell, I'd recommend you get this book. You might want a companion volume on the big ideas behind Haskell and its design, but this book will fill you in on how to actually code Haskell.
 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Banner


Visual Differential Geometry and Forms

Author:  Tristan Needham
Publisher: Princeton
Pages: 584
ISBN: 978-0691203706
Print: 0691203709
Kindle: B08TT6QBZH
Audience: Math enthusiasts
Rating: 5
Reviewer: Mike James
The best math book I have read in a long time...



SQL Server 2022 Query Performance Tuning (Apress)

Author: Grant Fritchey
Publisher: Apress
Pages: 745
ISBN:978-1484288900
Print:1484288904
Kindle:B0BLYD98SQ
Audience: DBAs & SQL Devs
Rating: 4.7
Reviewer: Ian Stirk 

A popular performance tuning book gets updated for SQL Server 2022, how does it fare?


More Reviews