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Programming in Haskell
Haskell is a purely functional language that allows programmers to rapidly develop clear, concise, and correct software. The language has grown in popularity in recent years, both in teaching and in industry. This book is based on the author's experience of teaching Haskell for more than twenty years. All concepts are explained from first principles and no programming experience is required, making this book accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. While Part I focuses on basic concepts, Part II introduces the reader to more advanced topics. This new edition has been extensively updated and expanded to include recent and more advanced features of Haskell, new examples and exercises, selected solutions, and freely downloadable lecture slides and example code. The presentation is clean and simple, while also being fully compliant with the latest version of the language, including recent changes concerning applicative, monadic, foldable, and traversable types.
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About the author
Graham Hutton
2 books23 followersI'm from Glasgow in Scotland, and received a BSc and PhD in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow. I then spent a few years in research positions in Gothenburg and Utrecht, before moving to Nottingham where I am now Professor of Computer Science. I'm married to Annette, and we have two lovely boys. In my spare time I enjoy cars, cooking, and football. Both of our boys play in football teams, and we are all season ticket holders for Nottingham Forest.
I'm Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, where I co-lead the Functional Programming Lab and am the Director of Research.
My research interests are in functional programming, with an emphasis on formally-based approaches to program construction and verification. My aim is to develop simple but powerful techniques for writing and reasoning about programs, by recognising and exploiting their underlying mathematical structure. My work covers a range of topics in this area, including functional parsing, relational programming, recursion operators, coinductive types, exceptions and interrupts, space and time complexity, concurrent programming, and program optimisation.
Current and recent work:
The under-performing unfold (2013);
Compilation à la carte (2013);
Work it, wrap it, fix it, fold it (2013);
Representing contractive functions on streams (2011).
I'm Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, where I co-lead the Functional Programming Lab and am the Director of Research.
My research interests are in functional programming, with an emphasis on formally-based approaches to program construction and verification. My aim is to develop simple but powerful techniques for writing and reasoning about programs, by recognising and exploiting their underlying mathematical structure. My work covers a range of topics in this area, including functional parsing, relational programming, recursion operators, coinductive types, exceptions and interrupts, space and time complexity, concurrent programming, and program optimisation.
Current and recent work:
The under-performing unfold (2013);
Compilation à la carte (2013);
Work it, wrap it, fix it, fold it (2013);
Representing contractive functions on streams (2011).
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 52 reviews
February 5, 2017
This is a beautiful book for people who want to learn Haskell and functional programming as an advanced problem-solving tool.
First the good bits: The author's extensive university teaching and research experience shines throughout the book. Starting from the fundamental principles of functional programming, the author gently introduces the basic concepts and constructs of Haskell and strongly-typed functional programming. There are a lot of examples to demonstrate how the introduced concepts of Haskell and techniques of functional programming can be used to analyze and design solutions to problems of various complexity.
After introducing the basic building blocks of Haskell in the first part, the author goes on to introduce more complex topics such as monadic parsing, as well as modern Haskell concepts such as Applicative, Traversable and Foldable type classes. Following these, another very important notion, "lazy evaluation" is introduced and its usage is described, why and how it fits into Haskell explained with examples.
The exercises at the end of the chapter are carefully planned, and serve to force the reader's mind to understand concepts by forcing her to practice and think by herself.
I have to say that the final two chapters is where the book totally shines. First the author introduces what it means to reason about programs and shows how systematic thinking can be applied to designing a solution. In the chapter that follows, that is the final chapter, the reader sees the full power of the ideas developed in the previous chapter applied by calculating compilers, that is, starting from a specification for a programming language, to reaching a correct compiler that can parse the statements in that language and evaluate them to produce the results. The way to do is by using induction and realizing that this systematic method can be applied to languages of ever increasing complexity is mind-blowing moment in itself.
Now the not-so-good bits: Even though the books exemplifies how to break down problems into small pieces and how to compose small building blocks to create bigger and more complex Haskell solutions, it is definitely not enough for the "working programmer". That is, you will definitely learn a lot of important and critical Haskell principles and techniques from this book but you'll also miss a lot of other important aspects such as:
- A stronger focus on type-driven program design in Haskell
- Building Haskell projects and packages
- Writing tests, both traditional unit tests, and extensive automated QuickCheck style tests
- Profiling your programs
- How to properly benchmark your programs
- More detailed parsing techniques and libraries
- Web-based programming
- Network programming
- And few more topics that will be important if you're working in a team of Haskell developers, working to produce software products and services for your customers.
And you'll definitely need another book for that, the strongest contender being Haskell Book as of 2017 (see my review at https://ileriseviye.wordpress.com/2017/01/01/one-year-with-haskell-programming-from-first-principles/.
Having said that, I'd still consider this Second Edition of Programming in Haskell by Hutton to be perfectly suitable for a modern Haskell introduction, provided that it is backed up by a teacher in a classroom environment; someone that can fill in the missing parts. The final chapters of the book will definitely appeal to programmers and students who want to continue their journey into the more research-oriented areas such as compiler design.
Overall, I'm more than satisfied to add this book to my Haskell and functional programming shelf, and whenever I'll need concise descriptions of fundamental as well as modern ideas, this will be among my go-to books for enlightenment.
First the good bits: The author's extensive university teaching and research experience shines throughout the book. Starting from the fundamental principles of functional programming, the author gently introduces the basic concepts and constructs of Haskell and strongly-typed functional programming. There are a lot of examples to demonstrate how the introduced concepts of Haskell and techniques of functional programming can be used to analyze and design solutions to problems of various complexity.
After introducing the basic building blocks of Haskell in the first part, the author goes on to introduce more complex topics such as monadic parsing, as well as modern Haskell concepts such as Applicative, Traversable and Foldable type classes. Following these, another very important notion, "lazy evaluation" is introduced and its usage is described, why and how it fits into Haskell explained with examples.
The exercises at the end of the chapter are carefully planned, and serve to force the reader's mind to understand concepts by forcing her to practice and think by herself.
I have to say that the final two chapters is where the book totally shines. First the author introduces what it means to reason about programs and shows how systematic thinking can be applied to designing a solution. In the chapter that follows, that is the final chapter, the reader sees the full power of the ideas developed in the previous chapter applied by calculating compilers, that is, starting from a specification for a programming language, to reaching a correct compiler that can parse the statements in that language and evaluate them to produce the results. The way to do is by using induction and realizing that this systematic method can be applied to languages of ever increasing complexity is mind-blowing moment in itself.
Now the not-so-good bits: Even though the books exemplifies how to break down problems into small pieces and how to compose small building blocks to create bigger and more complex Haskell solutions, it is definitely not enough for the "working programmer". That is, you will definitely learn a lot of important and critical Haskell principles and techniques from this book but you'll also miss a lot of other important aspects such as:
- A stronger focus on type-driven program design in Haskell
- Building Haskell projects and packages
- Writing tests, both traditional unit tests, and extensive automated QuickCheck style tests
- Profiling your programs
- How to properly benchmark your programs
- More detailed parsing techniques and libraries
- Web-based programming
- Network programming
- And few more topics that will be important if you're working in a team of Haskell developers, working to produce software products and services for your customers.
And you'll definitely need another book for that, the strongest contender being Haskell Book as of 2017 (see my review at https://ileriseviye.wordpress.com/2017/01/01/one-year-with-haskell-programming-from-first-principles/.
Having said that, I'd still consider this Second Edition of Programming in Haskell by Hutton to be perfectly suitable for a modern Haskell introduction, provided that it is backed up by a teacher in a classroom environment; someone that can fill in the missing parts. The final chapters of the book will definitely appeal to programmers and students who want to continue their journey into the more research-oriented areas such as compiler design.
Overall, I'm more than satisfied to add this book to my Haskell and functional programming shelf, and whenever I'll need concise descriptions of fundamental as well as modern ideas, this will be among my go-to books for enlightenment.
November 11, 2012
I think that it is a very good introductory academic text on Haskell that doesn't concentrate much on Haskell features but rather on functional programming and functional thinking. There are a lot of extended examples to reveal the nature of functional programming. I would also recommend the lectures by Erik Meijer based on this book on Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Le....
May 3, 2022
I **LOVED** this book.
Read this because I wasn't familiar with Haskell (even though I've been doing Racket, OCaml, F# for a while now...) and a number of books I was keen on reading next were using Haskell (it looks like a subset of the PLT community use Haskell as their medium of choice).
The book really stretched me in some of the chapters of the second part, but what I really liked was the questions (and answers) and the fact that **all** of the code runs as is (not always the case with some programming books).
Definitely one of the best programming books I've read thus far.
Read this because I wasn't familiar with Haskell (even though I've been doing Racket, OCaml, F# for a while now...) and a number of books I was keen on reading next were using Haskell (it looks like a subset of the PLT community use Haskell as their medium of choice).
The book really stretched me in some of the chapters of the second part, but what I really liked was the questions (and answers) and the fact that **all** of the code runs as is (not always the case with some programming books).
Definitely one of the best programming books I've read thus far.
March 12, 2016
Great companion book to Erik Meijer's FP101x course on functional programming. Concise.
August 9, 2017
This is such an excellent book, I wish there were more like it. So well designed it should be a blueprint for other programming books. Graham Hutton has a way of being succinct and clear so you spend more time thinking than reading. The exercises are interesting and get you to the next level.
July 21, 2024
Pretty clear and concise had to finish it for my masters! Although not a huge fan of Haskell!
December 9, 2014
Introducción simple y directa a la programación funcional, el lenguaje de programación Haskell y sobre como razonar sobre programas. Cada capitulo introduce conceptos, explica mediante ejemplos y finaliza con ejercicios para reforzar la comprensión de los temas tratados.
May 27, 2018
A delightful little book on Haskell. I'd been exposed to Haskell before, so it wasn't entirely new to me, but this book definitely deepened my understanding. The book is concise, and focuses on the functional programming side of Haskell rather than for instance the programming-in-the-large side. Everything in it was material I wanted to learn better or review. This book (with some auxiliary web articles) pushed me over the line from basically being clueless about monads to basically feeling that I know what's going on (though of course there's still much more to learn). The last two chapters (in this second edition) detail some of the authors recent work on proving program correctness and calculating compilers, and I thoroughly enjoyed those though I wouldn't expect to see them in *every* book. The book has a moderate-sized but excellent bibliography: all of the later chapters point to the key articles that developed the topics and I know where to go to read more deeply. For those who are at all interested in functional programming, this is strongly recommended. I much prefer it to Moronuki and Allen's book, which I find far too wordy and jokey.
February 9, 2024
Amazing introduction to Haskell. Can recommend to anyone who has the gonads to take on the monads.
November 13, 2025
I've seen this book described as the KnR of Haskell. That's the exact feeling I've had while reading it. The book is well structured and the writing is tight. It does have a clear theoretical slant (I don't imagine I'll derive correct-by-construction compilers any time soon for work, no matter how much I'd like to), but that's very much in line with much of the work Haskell's used for. The informational content is high; the volume packs a lot in ~260 pages. Keeping in mind that it comes with answers for most exercises and the definition of a cut down Prelude module, it's even more impressive.
August 2, 2016
good book for beginner, except two things:
1, it's a little old
2, it has too little about monads
1, it's a little old
2, it has too little about monads
September 14, 2018
I read the second edition of this book.
Let me summarise what I liked:
- To the point explanations.
- Extended examples were great for learning and getting used to of haskell syntax.
- Great exercises for learning.
- Covers quite a good amount of content in a small text.
- Thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on monadic parsing.
- Last two chapters are quite interesting. I had an intuition that reasoning about programs must be very challenging but it turns out that the ideas behind reasoning are quite approachable and the complexity depends on the program.
- One brilliant idea in the penultimate chapter was that mathematical induction can also help to generate optimizations of the program. I am not sure how far this can be helpful but certainly an awesome idea.
And few things that could have been better:
- For a first time learner, topics like monads, and applicatives could have been explained with more examples. Though the examples contained are good and motivating but few more examples would have helped. In general, I felt that topics which I already had some idea(in other language) were explained in good enough detail but topics which were new felt bit more terse and lacked examples.
- Few topics felt lacking the higher level view. For eg State Monad was introduced without any motivation and only later when we go to an example the reader gets to connect the dots.
Overall, I think this is a nice introduction to haskell for readers who already have some programming experience in other languages.
Let me summarise what I liked:
- To the point explanations.
- Extended examples were great for learning and getting used to of haskell syntax.
- Great exercises for learning.
- Covers quite a good amount of content in a small text.
- Thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on monadic parsing.
- Last two chapters are quite interesting. I had an intuition that reasoning about programs must be very challenging but it turns out that the ideas behind reasoning are quite approachable and the complexity depends on the program.
- One brilliant idea in the penultimate chapter was that mathematical induction can also help to generate optimizations of the program. I am not sure how far this can be helpful but certainly an awesome idea.
And few things that could have been better:
- For a first time learner, topics like monads, and applicatives could have been explained with more examples. Though the examples contained are good and motivating but few more examples would have helped. In general, I felt that topics which I already had some idea(in other language) were explained in good enough detail but topics which were new felt bit more terse and lacked examples.
- Few topics felt lacking the higher level view. For eg State Monad was introduced without any motivation and only later when we go to an example the reader gets to connect the dots.
Overall, I think this is a nice introduction to haskell for readers who already have some programming experience in other languages.
October 31, 2018
The first half of the text I think is good, although not exceptionally so, at explaining the syntax and ideas behind fairly standard Haskell features. It's main competition, Learn You A Haskell, is free and does at least as good a job. The second half of the book is about monads and monoids, which I still don't fully understand, and I think that is a reflection on the quality of explanation in this book (maybe it reflects on my own inability to grasp the topic too, who knows?).
It seems to me the book has in mind a reader who has worked in industrial or commercial applications using relatively deep programming concepts and techniques, just not the particular ones in Haskell--so there isn't a lot of need, in the author's mind, for explaining a lot of the surrounding concepts. It assumes the reader already mostly has these concepts clearly in mind, but just needs to learn how to implement them in this new language. For me that was very much not the case, and when picking up the book, I didn't realize this background understanding was assumed. I don't think the author fully realizes how much he assumes this in his explanations, too.
It seems to me the book has in mind a reader who has worked in industrial or commercial applications using relatively deep programming concepts and techniques, just not the particular ones in Haskell--so there isn't a lot of need, in the author's mind, for explaining a lot of the surrounding concepts. It assumes the reader already mostly has these concepts clearly in mind, but just needs to learn how to implement them in this new language. For me that was very much not the case, and when picking up the book, I didn't realize this background understanding was assumed. I don't think the author fully realizes how much he assumes this in his explanations, too.
April 27, 2020
This book is a fun way to bend one's mind into new shapes. It's reasonably well organized for reading straight through, up to the point where I stopped.
I didn't stop because I don't want to read the rest. I stopped because I knew that if I continued to the end now I wouldn't get enough from the rest of the book. Too much other stuff demands my attention to give Haskell the attention it deserves right now, and while I was able to get up to section 7.5 (halfway through chapter 7) without any real problems the cognitive load was getting a little heavy for me when I don't have the leisure to sit down at a computer and play around with Haskell for an hour each day to help me absorb what I've been reading.
If you want to learn some interesting mathematical concepts, this book could actually serve to help you. Some people have difficulty learning "pure" math, but get along much better learning the exact same concepts via programming. This book is densely packed with that kind of thing. Give it a try.
I don't know when I'll get back to Haskell, but when I do I'm pretty sure I'll be happy to have this book near at hand. It's dry, but clear, interesting, and instructive.
I didn't stop because I don't want to read the rest. I stopped because I knew that if I continued to the end now I wouldn't get enough from the rest of the book. Too much other stuff demands my attention to give Haskell the attention it deserves right now, and while I was able to get up to section 7.5 (halfway through chapter 7) without any real problems the cognitive load was getting a little heavy for me when I don't have the leisure to sit down at a computer and play around with Haskell for an hour each day to help me absorb what I've been reading.
If you want to learn some interesting mathematical concepts, this book could actually serve to help you. Some people have difficulty learning "pure" math, but get along much better learning the exact same concepts via programming. This book is densely packed with that kind of thing. Give it a try.
I don't know when I'll get back to Haskell, but when I do I'm pretty sure I'll be happy to have this book near at hand. It's dry, but clear, interesting, and instructive.
June 25, 2017
There's a newer version. Go read that one instead.
January 13, 2021
being my first book for getting into haskell, and coming from a Scala/Java background it's great to start with. Took sometime to get some basics down, but overall it's great.
June 12, 2022
Wonderful introduction to Haskell, and surprisingly challenging!
September 24, 2023
Loved this book as a Haskell introductory book. States in a simple way how to use Haskell, putting all the mumbo-jumbo in a clear and easy way to understand.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 52 reviews