Tuesday, 6 January 2009

Book: Real World Haskell (not much real world so far :)

I've just started to read Real World Haskell (the paper book). It seems like a nice book (except for a few irritating and confusing typos/mistakes at the start of the book).

However, I've read more than 100 pages so far, and still not a sign of any of the "real world" stuff promised by the title. I still don't know much or anything about IDE:s, how to compile the code, scripting, any practical details on how to structure your code into modules, or anything in that direction. So far, mostly (sometimes rather long-wined) discussions on specific (list) functions. One of the examples, end up in a conclusion that might be paraphrased as "by the way, don't use the function we've discussed the last few pages; in real world settings it doesn't work too well".

In the real world, you run into both needles and haystacks , occasionally, but that doesn't help making sense of

isInAny3 needle haystack = any (isInfixOf needle) haystack
And one more real world example of the kind zip3foobar "quux" and I may start losing interest... or just start screaming.

Well, the upcoming chapters have promising titles, so I guess I just have to keep reading. And I guess you have to start with the basics. Still, over 100 pages, and mostly foobars so far...

The book is available on-line.