Beginning Haskell: A Project-Based Approach

Beginning Haskell provides a broad-based introduction to the Haskell language, its libraries and environment, and to the functional programming paradigm that is fast growing in importance in the software industry. The book takes a project-based approach to learning the language that is unified around the building of a web-based storefront. Excellent coverage is given to the Haskell ecosystem and supporting tools. These include the Cabal build tool for managing projects and modules, the HUnit and QuickCheck tools for software testing, the Scotty framework for developing web applications, Persistent and Esqueleto for database access, and also parallel and distributed programming libraries.

Functional programming is gathering momentum, allowing programmers to express themselves in a more concise way, reducing boilerplate and increasing the safety of code. Indeed, mainstream languages such as C# and Java are adopting features from functional programming, and from languages implementing that paradigm. Haskell is an elegant and noise-free pure functional language with a long history, having a huge number of library contributors and an active community. This makes Haskell the best tool for both learning and applying functional programming, and Beginning Haskell the perfect book to show off the language and what it can do.

• Takes you through a series of projects showing the different parts of the language.
• Provides an overview of the most important libraries and tools in the Haskell ecosystem.
• Teaches you how to apply functional patterns in real-world scenarios.

What you’ll learn

• Build small and large projects using the Haskell language.
• Profit from ecosystem tools such as Cabal, HLint, and QuickCheck.
• Implement efficient stream I/O via libraries like Conduit.
• Parallelize code to run on multiple processors or distributed across a network.
• Create domain-specific languages useable by business users, and to tackle specific problem domains.
• Build Haskell-backed websites using database and web-application libraries such as Persistent, Esqueleto, and Scotty

Who this book is for

Beginning Haskell is for programmers new to functional programming, who want to learn this new paradigm and how it can improve the quality of their code. Beginning Haskell is also a great choice for functional programmers wanting to get a taste of the Haskell ecosystem and its unique features, or who wish to learn about advanced type system features and patterns.

About the Author

Alejandro Serrano Mena is working towards his PhD thesis in the Software Technology group in Utrecht University. He is passionate for functional programming, and has been coding Haskell for personal and professional projects for more than five years. During his college years he was active in an association promoting functional languages among students, giving talks and helping programmers get started in the functional paradigm. In 2011 he took part in the Google Summer of Code program, enhancing the Haskell plug-in for the popular development environment Eclipse. His current position involves research for enhancing the way in which developers get feedback and interact with strong type systems such as Haskell's.