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Real World Haskell | 
 enlarge | Authors: Bryan O'sullivan, John Goerzen, Don Stewart
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
Buy New: $37.47
You Save: $12.52 (25%)
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 9801
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 710
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.6
ISBN: 0596514980
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9780596514983
Publication Date: December 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: I20090102032137S
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Product 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. With this book, you will: 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
The best book on Haskell to come along in a long time January 7, 2009
calvinnme (Fredericksburg, Va)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Until this book came along you really needed two books to learn Haskell Programming. Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (2nd Edition) (International Computer Science Series) teaches the mechanics of Haskell programming, but it can be dry reading. The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia shows you the possibilities of Haskell via multimedia programming, but it does miss some basic details about the language that are in the first book. This second book is lots of fun, but I think that the new O'Reilly book replaces the first book entirely and some of the functionality of the second.
Haskell has its roots in academia, and functional programming requires lots of up-front thinking about your total approach. It is not a language where you can usually just sit down and start coding. This book shows you how to use functional programming and Haskell to solve real-world problems. Each chapter contains many code samples, and many contain complete applications. The book contains an application that downloads podcast episodes from the web and stores the history in an SQL database. There is also an application that takes a grainy phone camera photo of the barcode on a book and transforms it into an identifier that you can then ue to query a library website. This is the "fun stuff" that seems to work out so well and so elegantly in the Haskell language.
It is not necessary that you have any prior knowledge of Haskell or functional programming concepts, however general programming concepts are a requirement. This is certainly the first Haskell book to come along in a few years that I would recommend for the novice. As usual with the best of O'Reilly's programming books, this one is well illustrated with lots of well-commented code. The following is the table of contents:
Chapter 1. Getting Started
Chapter 2. Types and Functions
Chapter 3. Defining Types, Streamlining Functions
Chapter 4. Functional Programming
Chapter 5. Writing a Library: Working with JSON Data
Chapter 6. Using Typeclasses
Chapter 7. I/O
Chapter 8. Efficient File Processing, Regular Expressions, and Filename Matching
Chapter 9. I/O Case Study: A Library for Searching the Filesystem
Chapter 10. Code Case Study: Parsing a Binary Data Format
Chapter 11. Testing and Quality Assurance
Chapter 12. Barcode Recognition
Chapter 13. Data Structures
Chapter 14. Monads
Chapter 15. Programming with Monads
Chapter 16. Using Parsec
Chapter 17. Interfacing with C: The FFI
Chapter 18. Monad Transformers
Chapter 19. Error Handling
Chapter 20. Systems Programming in Haskell
Chapter 21. Using Databases
Chapter 22. Extended Example: Web Client Programming
Chapter 23. GUI Programming with gtk2hs
Chapter 24. Concurrent and Multicore Programming
Chapter 25. Profiling and Optimization
Chapter 26. Advanced Library Design: Building a Bloom Filter
Chapter 27. Sockets and Syslog
Chapter 28. Software Transactional Memory
Appendix A. Installing GHC and Haskell Libraries
Section A.1. Installing GHC
Section A.2. Installing Haskell Software
Appendix B. Characters, Strings, and Escaping Rules
Section B.1. Writing Character and String Literals
Section B.2. International Language Support
Section B.3. Escaping Text
Excellent, paradigm shifting book January 5, 2009
Max Cantor (Singapore)
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] -> [[a]]
powerset = filterM (const [True, False])
Game changing book December 18, 2008
Matthew Podwysocki (Washington, DC USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This by far is one of the best programming books not only on Haskell as the language, but also the fundamentals of pure functional programming in general. This book in my opinion is a game changer to bring Haskell to the forefront of people's attentions. Whether you've been a programmer for years or just starting out, this book fits both needs quite nicely. If only other books could live up to this standard.
With some proper emphasis on parallel programming, pure functional programming language shine. This section is very well written on patterns and strategies of parallel programming and multicore programming and some of the problems we face today.
I highly recommend that people purchase this book. With the attention it has been receiving, I believe that it will dramatically increase the popularity and viability of pure functional programming. And best of all, I think you'll love it as I have.
One of the best programming books in recent years December 18, 2008
Gregory Knapen (Montreal)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is one of the best programming books that came out in recent years regardless of language. It covers all the main concepts of the Haskell language and functional programming while at the same time showing how they can be used in real world code. Once past the first few chapters, the examples become non trivial and start to combine multiple concepts to produce short powerful programs, yet remaining totally accessible.
Maybe this is testimony to the conciseness of Haskell language, but to cover the same amount of material the examples cover in another more mainstream language would have taken several more pages if not multiple volumes. How many books cover file processing, regex, parsing, network programming, web programming, system programing, GUI programming and 2 different concurrency mechanisms while teaching a new language all that in around 600 pages. Not many. Above all this book really teaches how to design practical programs in a functional way. An area that was somewhat lacking. So this books might help a broader adoption of FP for real world stuff even if not in Haskell.
The only negatives I could find besides a few typos (It is still a first edition after all) was the usage of the $ operator in examples before it was actually explained. These are minor and don't really take anything away from this book.
A life-changer December 15, 2008
Evgeny Kirpichov
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
It serves at least those purposes:
- Makes one an overall better programmer by teaching to think about problems in a functional mindset, thus teaching modularity and abstraction (because functional programs tend to be modular and abstract 'by construction')
- By introducing some of Haskell's extremely powerful libraries, such as STM and QuickCheck, motivates to search for equally unbelievably beautiful design decisions in casual programming
- Teaches one to program useful, reliable, fast, concurrent, tested, and-so-on real-world applications in Haskell
I beleive that the book will play a seminal role in popularization of functional programming, and, consequently, in increasing the number of good programmers and good code in the world :)
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