For those of you who aren't familiar with the author's other works, it's worth taking a peek at his other books.<p>I can whole heatedly recommend
Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Richard/dp/0521513383" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Pearls-Functional-Algorithm-Design-Ric...</a><p>It's a good cross between two other excellent books:<p>- Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp/0201657880" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Pearls-2nd-Jon-Bentley/dp/...</a><p>and<p>- Chris Okasaki's Purely Function Data Structures
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Okasaki/dp/0521663504" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...</a>.<p>If you haven't read all three, its well worth your while to do so!<p>And of course if you are going down the rabbit hole of reading Perls of Functional Algorithm Design then you need to read the "how to read Pearls of Functional Algorithm design" as well.<p><a href="http://www.atamo.com/blog/how-to-read-pearls-by-richard-bird-1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.atamo.com/blog/how-to-read-pearls-by-richard-bird...</a>
Richard Bird was my lecturer at university - Intro to functional programming was on the pre-university required reading list... We were told to buy our professor's book before arriving.<p>Turns out it was an excellent course, and Haskell is a great intro to programming in general, but the book? Think I sold it back via Amazon in the first term.<p>Haven't read this new book, but $90 seems like a price set to be sold to university libraries, not students - surprised to see it on the HN homepage.
I'm contemplating buying this, but I won't let myself until I feel like I've done all the exercises in "Beginning Haskell"[0].<p>0: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Haskell-A-Project-Based-Approach/dp/1430262508" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Haskell-A-Project-Based-Appr...</a>
Looks like an updated version of his 1998 book "Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell":<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Functional-Programming-using-Haskell/dp/0134843460" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Functional-Programming-us...</a><p>The 1998 book was excellent, except that it came just before Haskell 98 and so one or two examples needed a little modification before they would build with GHC, but really it was a paper and pencil type of thing. I read the whole thing sitting in a copyright library without a computer because the book was two expensive to buy and was not in my university library. Looks like that won't change with this update.
Ok, I'm not a big fan of ads here at Hacker News, but actually you kind of proved me wrong as I'm genuinely curious and very tempted to give it a try :-). It looks like a book that could help me become a better dev. I'd probably be using FP via F# at the end of the day, but it's more about the FP mindset, that I think I still don't have.<p>Anyway, buy it somewhere else! (I will do ...). I know, Amazon is super cheap and convenient, but we need competition and diversity.