Beginners Guide to Haskell? [closed]

122
votes

I've been looking for a decent guide to Haskell for some time, but haven't been able to find one that seems interesting enough to read through and/or makes sense.

I've had prior exposure to Haskell a few years back, but I can't remember much about it. I remember the "Aha!"-feeling was incredible when I finally got it, and it was actually fun to play with, so I'm looking to rediscover the lost art of Haskell.

I'm familiar with Ruby and its functional programming tricks, so I think I'm not completely in the dark. Any links?

16
haskellfunctional-programming
I was searching for a beginners guide to haskell and came here. How is the original question not constructive? Closing it is even less constructive. PFFT this is sometimes such an elitist site. – drumfire
@drumfire: Now we have new reasons and there's a better one to close it, as off-topic: Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it. – Casimir Crystal

16 Answers

75
votes

This looks like it fits the bill in the style of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!

22
votes

If you're like me, and like videos of presentations, than this is a good tutorial:

A Taste of Haskell

It's a three-hour tutorial, that uses xmonad as a running example to explain Haskell to experienced (imperative) programmers. The presentation is given by Simon Peyton-Jones who, besides being one of the top Haskell designers, is also a great speaker.

19
votes

Once you get past the beginning stages, I would highly recommend reading Real World Haskell.

12
votes

The Haskell wikibook which includes the text from the great tutorial Yet Another Haskell Tutorial.

(The "Generic Haskell User Guide" paper is a fine paper, but I think it is a particularly bad recommendation for a beginning Haskell programmer, as it is more of an academic paper presenting extensions to Haskell and basically a different language "Generic Haskell" (i.e. Haskell with an old version of Generics) instead of standard Haskell 98. <irony>If you were looking for dense reading about Haskell, start with the Haskell 98 report.</irony>)

11
votes

Real World Haskell is a really good book.

10
votes

Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (PDF) worked for me.

Edit: Updike points out that the text of YAHT has been folded into the Haksell Wikibooks. The PDF is still useful if you (like me) prefer to print out and read on paper.

BTW I have also read A Gentle Introduction To Haskell (also available as PDF). I will definitely not recommend this for beginners. It is only gentle compared to the Haskell Report. However it is a good reference when you have a solid understanding of the language.

7
votes

A rather late response but I thoroughly enjoyed reading from Learn You A Haskell available online as well as a book.

6
votes

I've been told to look at Programming in Haskell, from Graham Hutton

6
votes

In addition to "Real World Haskell", find a copy of "Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming". Great textbook.

5
votes

I like Haskell Tutorial for C Programmers. Especially if you are coming from an imperative language background as I do.

4
votes

I have downloaded 10 slides from this page http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html and going through it for many times. It workz ;)

4
votes

Strange that nobody suggested Real World Haskell. That's IMHO the best Haskell book you currently can get you can get it for on or offline reading.

3
votes

One thing that is really unique about Haskell is that there is a mailing list exactly for beginners. Go to Haskell-Beginners.

Reading books is good, but having some humans to ask is always a great resource, too. Together, I think there is absolutely no reason to say "Haskell is hard to learn because there's no material on it."

You might also want to visit #haskell at irc.freenode.net.

3
votes

There is also a nice lecture series from the RWTH Achen.

I got all of this info from the Haskell Wiki's Video presentations page.

2
votes

This is where I started. haskell.org