Real World Haskell

Code You Can Believe In

By Bryan O'Sullivan, Donald Bruce Stewart, John Goerzen
November 2008
Pages: 710
ISBN 10: 0-596-51498-0 | ISBN 13: 9780596514983
Press Release
(5) (Average of 1 Customer Reviews)

Description

This easy-to-use, fast-moving tutorial introduces you to functional programming with Haskell. You'll learn how to use Haskell in a variety of practical ways, from short scripts to large and demanding applications. Real World Haskell takes you through the basics of functional programming at a brisk pace, and then helps you increase your understanding of Haskell in real-world issues like I/O, performance, dealing with data, concurrency, and more as you move through each chapter.
Full Description

Understand the differences between procedural and functional programming
Learn the features of Haskell, and how to use it to develop useful programs
Interact with filesystems, databases, and network services
Write solid code with automated tests, code coverage, and error handling
Harness the power of multicore systems via concurrent and parallel programming

You'll find plenty of hands-on exercises, along with examples of real Haskell programs that you can modify, compile, and run. Whether or not you've used a functional language before, if you want to understand why Haskell is coming into its own as a practical language in so many major organizations, Real World Haskell is the best place to start.

Featured customer reviews

Good Book for those stepping into the Haskell world, June 02 2009

Rating:

Submitted by Jeff Bergman [Respond | View]

Real World Haskell is very ambitious in its scope. It tries to gradually introduce the Haskell way of doing things such that even someone coming from an imperative programming background can follow.

As a consequence some concepts are not formally explained until later in the book, like Monads. Instead the book shows you how to use Haskell's I/O facilities, without an understanding of Monads, first.

For some this approach is probably very practical but I found myself at times wanting the material to be presented in a different order.

However, I am still giving this book 5 stars because of the sheer breadth and quality of the content and examples. And the later chapters really do tie all the concepts together with some non-trivial examples.

The first four chapters and chapter six lay the foundation for the rest of the book. I found that a good understanding of this material was crucial for later chapters, where they combine different features of the language in more complicated ways.

After that I was particularly fond of chapters 10, 13,14, 15, 16, 18, and 26, as these chapters explained some of the more advanced concepts I was interested in like Monads, Parsing, and Functional Data Structures.

Overall, I learned a ton of new things from reading this book
even thought the material is quite challenging in places, and found myself wondering why more people don't use Haskell.

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Media reviews
"In the last five years Haskell has burst out of the laboratory, and is now increasingly used by professional developers to get Real Work done. This book is the first to cover the full spectrum of techniques that a Real World programmer needs: not only types and list manipulation, but input/output, parsing, databases, GUIs, networking, foreign-function interface, error handling, profiling, testing. The focus is intensely practical, the pages are packed with executable code samples, and the pace is rapid. Best of all, this book will expand your mind. It will give you a new way of thinking about the whole enterprise of programming: when you have worked through these pages, you'll write better code in your current favourite language. But take care: Haskell is addictive."
-- Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Haskell language architect and designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler

"This book is exactly what's needed--a deep and comprehensive guide, covering everything from fundamentals to a wealth of advanced topics, aimed at experienced programmers who want to harness Haskell's power to get the job done. I will be using it in my Advanced Programming classes from now on."
-- Benjamin Pierce, Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, author of Types and Programming Languages

"The book is a must-read for not only people who would specifically like to learn Haskell, but for any programmer who is open to new ways of thinking about computing. "
-- Evgeny Kirpichov, Amazon.com

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"...this book will expand your mind. It will give you a new way of thinking about the whole enterprise of programming: when you have worked through these pages, you'll write better code in your current favourite language."
--Simon Peyton Jones, Microsoft Research, Haskell language architect and designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler