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Real World Haskell Paperback – Illustrated, 30 Dec. 2008
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- ISBN-100596514980
- ISBN-13978-0596514983
- EditionIllustrated
- PublisherO'Reilly Media
- Publication date30 Dec. 2008
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions17.78 x 4.32 x 23.34 cm
- Print length710 pages
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- Publisher : O'Reilly Media; Illustrated edition (30 Dec. 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 710 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0596514980
- ISBN-13 : 978-0596514983
- Dimensions : 17.78 x 4.32 x 23.34 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 166,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 108 in Amazon Online Shopping
- 130 in Programming Languages & Tools
- 420 in Software Design & Development
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2016After a lifetime of programming in declarative languages like C, C++ and Java, I find it difficult to switch into the functional programming mindset. I suspect this is more to do with my age than anything else. I’m particularly interested in how to build systems that effectively make use of modern multi-core computers, assuming that we’ll soon have computers with hundreds of cores. In spite of what some experts say, I have grave doubts about our ability to reliably build such systems in the likes of Java; yes, there will some people who will be able to do it, but how will the common or garden developer do it?
Enter functional programming. Erlang has the ability to succeed with multi-cores, though I have my doubts about its efficiency; it’s great for network-heavy applications, but is it quite so great for compute-intensive apps? I’m not convinced yet that functional programming (Erlang excepted) has the ability *right now* to build hugely scalable multi-core apps - but I think the potential is there, and any developer putting the effort into becoming proficient at functional programming may be hugely rewarded in the future.
Given this hypothesis, how to go about it? Haskell has a reputation of being an extremely pure functional language. It also has a reputation of being very hard to learn. This is where “Real World Haskell” comes in. If you study this book right to the end, you’ll have made the mindset switch. Be warned though, it has 650 pages and is heavy going. Not because it’s badly written; on the contrary, it’s written very well. It’s because there’s a huge amount of technical stuff to put over. Recursion, folds, partial functions, lambda functions, typeclasses, and monads anyone? (Write programs using recursion in Java etc, and get used to stack overflows; not the best way to write highly stable apps).
Back in the 1990s I went through another mindset switch - from procedural thinking to object thinking. I’m finding this one harder. After studying a couple of hundred pages, and having studied Erlang previously, I began to experience the mindset switch. Unfortunately it was fragile, one minute I was thinking functionally and the next back to declarative. The real world intervened though, and I had to stop the study; so I slid back to declarative thinking. Real soon now I’m going to take another run at it. Of all the Haskell books, this is the one I’ll use. I’ve found others either too simple or too academic; for me, this book is just right.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 November 2020Just working my way through this but it’s such a well written book, it’s a joy to read.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 November 2010If you like getting down and dirty with code then this is the book for you. Unlike some books that deal with the theory of Haskell first, Real World Haskel gets you walking though code right off the bat. At first I felt like I was making real progress but this was, for me at least, a false dawn as things slow down after the first few chapters, but I think this is the fault of the subject and not the book. Although some of the examples used were a little esoteric (a whole chapter on a bar code reader!) I have to give the authors credit because this book explained a difficult subject in an understandable way. In my view its worth reading if only to find out if Haskell is the right language for you.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2009This book is rich in content and motivation to learn one of the most interesting programming languages nowadays. For beginners and experts alike this book as something to offer for all of us. If you want to learn something new, something different, something better. Check out this book!
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 October 2013A very nice, thought-provoking read. The theory and the hands-on examples are mixed in a perfect ratio to turn your imperative mind inside out.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 February 2019Great practical book
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2018Useful book
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 September 2012I bought the Kindle edition of this book having done functional programming with other languages before (Lisp and Scala). The first third or so of this book was material very familiar to me from those other languages and even here I found the book hard work. There were mistakes where the description in the text did not match the sample code. There was an instance of sample code not compiling, and infact the compile error was printed into the book in place of where the program output was expected (maybe this is only present in the Kindle print). Sample code was often too abstract using identifier names that did not help me to understand what the sample code was trying to achieve (ironic for "real world" haskell). In other cases the sample code required functions that would only be implemented much later in the book (very confusing if you are trying out the samples as you read).
The next third or so of the book was new territory for me, and here I found myself often second guessing the text of the book. I suspected mistakes but did not have the confidence to know for sure. At this point the online version of the book proved to be very helpful ([...]). Here there are plenty of online comments from readers of the book that correct many of the mistakes and clear up confusion. Take a skim at some of the comments there before you buy to get an indication of the types of problems this book has.
I gave up on this book at roughly the two thirds mark, and am now instead reading "Programming in Haskell". I have yet to complete this alternative book but so far it is of much higher standard than Real World Haskell.
Top reviews from other countries
- tommasoReviewed in Italy on 27 February 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars wow!
wow! many years ago I wrote my thesis on ML type system and its extensions possibilities, and now that I'm sixty this book is really a joy.
Haskell represents the legacy of ML philosophy and this book makes it available to everyone with clarity and freshness. I strongly advice it even if you will continue to program in c javascript php etc.
haskell helps you to think in a new clear way!
- Justin HanekomReviewed in Canada on 24 July 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
I love this computer language and I love this book. Well done!
- GBReviewed in Germany on 16 May 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Not an easy read, but definitely brilliant and worth studying
Having a background in science, with this book I felt the way I used to feel with college textbooks back in my student days - you're happy if you can digest a page or two in a day. But once you understood the stuff, the knowledge becomes a part of your internal thinking and reasoning.
Chapter 10 with its ad-hoc monadic parser is ``a newbie killer''. The discussions of parseByte on the website with the text of the book helps. Reading on the state monad helps to understand the chapter too.
- Max CantorReviewed in the United States on 5 January 2009
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, paradigm shifting book
Before purchasing RWH, I had already read the whole book on its website in beta form. Even though I have a decent amount of haskell experience, I was very very pleased with this book. So much so, that I bought the hard copy to have as a reference and because part of me felt like I owed to the authors. I should also note that the authors are often in #haskell and each of them have been extremely helpful to me in the past.
The authors do a great job of explaining the value of taking on the challenge of coding in a pure, functional language. As clock speeds stagnate and the number of cores available to programmers increases, this will only become truer with time. As the authors demonstrate, Haskell is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this new paradigm. The other paradigm shift is that this is the first major book (AFAIK) to address Haskell from a practical as opposed to academic perspective. It does so with shining colors.
I can't recommend RWH strongly enough for anyone considering Haskell. As a last note, even if you can't conceive of a single time that you will ever need to use Haskell, learn it anyway. It will blow your mind. Check the canonical powerset of a list function below if you still need convincing:
powerset :: [a] ->
powerset = filterM (const [True, False])
- punterReviewed in France on 9 July 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, clear, convenient
Out of several Haskell textbooks on my bookshelf (pretty much all you can find on Amazon & internet bar Bird's books), this is the one I refer to most often and quickly find an answer.
You may need other Haskell books too but you can't go wrong with this one.