Real World Haskell [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Bryan O'Sullivan (Author), John Goerzen (Author), Don Stewart (Author)
Key Phrases: functional programming, parity digit, filename matching, Compiling Main, Extended Example, Nothing Just (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This easy-to-use, fast-moving tutorial introduces you to functional programming with Haskell. You'll learn how to use Haskell in a variety of practical ways, from short scripts to large and demanding applications. Real World Haskell takes you through the basics of functional programming at a brisk pace, and then helps you increase your understanding of Haskell in real-world issues like I/O, performance, dealing with data, concurrency, and more as you move through each chapter. With this book, you will:

• Understand the differences between procedural and functional programming
  
• Learn the features of Haskell, and how to use it to develop useful programs
  
• Interact with filesystems, databases, and network services
  
• Write solid code with automated tests, code coverage, and error handling
  
• Harness the power of multicore systems via concurrent and parallel programming

You'll find plenty of hands-on exercises, along with examples of real Haskell programs that you can modify, compile, and run. Whether or not you've used a functional language before, if you want to understand why Haskell is coming into its own as a practical language in so many major organizations, Real World Haskell is the best place to start.

About the Author
Bryan O'Sullivan is an Irish hacker and writer who likes distributed systems, open source software, and programming languages. He was a member of the initial design team for the Jini network service architecture (subsequently open sourced as Apache River). He has made significant contributions to, and written a book about, the popular Mercurial revision control system. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and sons. Whenever he can, he runs off to climb rocks.

John Goerzen is an American hacker and author. He has written a number of real-world Haskell libraries and applications, including the HDBC database interface, the ConfigFile configuration file interface, a podcast downloader, and various other libraries relating to networks, parsing, logging, and POSIX code. John has been a developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system project for over 10 years and maintains numerous Haskell libraries and code for Debian. He also served as President of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., the legal parent organization of Debian. John lives in rural Kansas with his wife and son, where he enjoys photography and geocaching.

Don Stewart is an Australian hacker based in Portland, Oregon. Don has been involved in a diverse range of Haskell projects, including practical libraries, such as Data.ByteString and Data.Binary, as well as applying the Haskell philosophy to real-world applications including compilers, linkers, text editors, network servers, and systems software. His recent work has focused on optimizing Haskell for high-performance scenarios, using techniques from term rewriting.

Product Details

• Paperback: 710 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (May 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596514980
• ISBN-13: 978-0596514983
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #36,497 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on Haskell to come along in a long time, January 7, 2009

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Until this book came along you really needed two books to learn Haskell Programming. Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (2nd Edition) (International Computer Science Series) teaches the mechanics of Haskell programming, but it can be dry reading. The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia shows you the possibilities of Haskell via multimedia programming, but it does miss some basic details about the language that are in the first book. This second book is lots of fun, but I think that the new O'Reilly book replaces the first book entirely and some of the functionality of the second.

Haskell has its roots in academia, and functional programming requires lots of up-front thinking about your total approach. It is not a language where you can usually just sit down and start coding. This book shows you how to use functional programming and Haskell to solve real-world problems. Each chapter contains many code samples, and many contain complete applications. The book contains an application that downloads podcast episodes from the web and stores the history in an SQL database. There is also an application that takes a grainy phone camera photo of the barcode on a book and transforms it into an identifier that you can then ue to query a library website. This is the "fun stuff" that seems to work out so well and so elegantly in the Haskell language.

It is not necessary that you have any prior knowledge of Haskell or functional programming concepts, however general programming concepts are a requirement. This is certainly the first Haskell book to come along in a few years that I would recommend for the novice. As usual with the best of O'Reilly's programming books, this one is well illustrated with lots of well-commented code. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. Getting Started
Chapter 2. Types and Functions
Chapter 3. Defining Types, Streamlining Functions
Chapter 4. Functional Programming
Chapter 5. Writing a Library: Working with JSON Data
Chapter 6. Using Typeclasses
Chapter 7. I/O
Chapter 8. Efficient File Processing, Regular Expressions, and Filename Matching
Chapter 9. I/O Case Study: A Library for Searching the Filesystem
Chapter 10. Code Case Study: Parsing a Binary Data Format
Chapter 11. Testing and Quality Assurance
Chapter 12. Barcode Recognition
Chapter 13. Data Structures
Chapter 14. Monads
Chapter 15. Programming with Monads
Chapter 16. Using Parsec
Chapter 17. Interfacing with C: The FFI
Chapter 18. Monad Transformers
Chapter 19. Error Handling
Chapter 20. Systems Programming in Haskell
Chapter 21. Using Databases
Chapter 22. Extended Example: Web Client Programming
Chapter 23. GUI Programming with gtk2hs
Chapter 24. Concurrent and Multicore Programming
Chapter 25. Profiling and Optimization
Chapter 26. Advanced Library Design: Building a Bloom Filter
Chapter 27. Sockets and Syslog
Chapter 28. Software Transactional Memory
Appendix A. Installing GHC and Haskell Libraries
Section A.1. Installing GHC
Section A.2. Installing Haskell Software
Appendix B. Characters, Strings, and Escaping Rules
Section B.1. Writing Character and String Literals
Section B.2. International Language Support
Section B.3. Escaping Text

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, November 30, 2008

By	H. Singh (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Still reading through it now.

The text is incredibly readable and straightforward. It's set up for those who already know how to program imperatively (e.g. C++/Java/C, etc), and takes those readers deep into Haskell & functional programming.

Covers important topics for new functional programmers, including performance analysis, testing, debugging, and optimization.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A timely cornucopia of Haskell knowledge, November 28, 2008

By	D. Leimbach "leimy2k" (Lynnwood, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a really good book to add to any Haskell programmer's bookshelf. It's also a really good book to help folks get started with Haskell programming if they've ever wanted to journey into the realm of functional programming.

The book covers a lot of topics and some areas I hadn't really thought of using Haskell for (barcode recognition).

Also it's the only Haskell book I know to cover some of the features of GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) and optimization using the tools that come with it.