Concise Haskell book

Question

In a blog post regarding his JavaScript book, Doug Crockford says

I relied on two models when I wrote JavaScript: The Good Parts. The first was Kernighan and Richie's The C Programming Language. It is a brilliant little book. I thought there should be a K&R for JavaScript. When it seems that most tech books are sold by the pound, it is nice to read a little book that cleanly lays out what you need to know.

What Haskell book comes closest to this philosophy?

Answer 1

Out of the few I have picked up, Real World Haskell seems the most approachable.

Answer 2

HaskellWiki is always a nice reference,

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Books

Answer 3

Edit: Just realized the below book has been imported into Wikibooks

I'm using this online book (PDF) to study Haskell.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/htut/

It's concise and explains the basic concepts well step by step. It's about 190 pages but with some small good exercise per section.

Answer 4

The most concise (but still helpful) is Gentle introduction to Haskell (PDF)

Answer 5

I'll also consider Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (YAHT).

Answer 6

I'd start with: http://learnyouahaskell.com/

It's a great book along the lines of Why's Ruby book.

Answer 7

If you are a real beginner I would recommend this book:

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html, it is designed to teach haskell to college students, so if you want to dive into more usable scenerio's you would need a more comprehensive book like real world haskell.

Answer 8

Crockford's quote goes on to say:

The other was William Goldman's The Princess Bride. Goldman remembers his grandfather reading him a wonderful book by S. Morgenstern. When he's grown he searches for the book and is very excited when he finally finds a copy, but discovers to his horror and confusion that it really isn't very good. Why did he remember it as being so wonderful? Because his grandfather only read him the good parts.

It's hard to say which Haskell tutorial is most in that spirit, but I'd guess Learn You a Haskell. On the other hand, I suspect that you have to know what the bad parts are anyway in practice so that you can avoid them or deal with them.

Answer 9

If you want a small, clean and good introduction that will give you the "feel" of Haskell, as well as covering the most important points you need to know, the Graham Hutton book is the way to go.

As well, Chapter 8 ("Functional Parsers") is probably the best introduction to learning to build your own monads I've read. (Yes, this is really something you want to learn, and yes, I know that the chapter doesn't actually mention the word "monad.")