Ben > Recent Status Updates

The main content is quite good; end-to-end worked examples with lots of explanation. It's a bit odd that they _also_ assume no familiarity with JavaScript and try to give a half-hearted tutorial along the way. It's not ideal for seasoned JS programmers _or_ newbies.

The chapters on fundamental typeclasses were the first ones that I found truly useful. In particular, functor composition was a new idea to me and took some getting used to (it's not immediately obvious how `(fmap . fmap) f` "just works", but it does). The examples and exercises were very useful.

My only complaint is the bizarre choice to introduce Monoid before Semigroup, given that the latter is more fundamental.

The chapter on building a project was mildly useful. The chapter on testing was verbose and did not offer much that you couldn't get by reading the documentation (just with more filler).

This book is verbose and best suited for beginners (to programming in general) so far. As an OCaml programmer, the first useful bits that I saw (besides language syntax) were regarding left/right associative folds and their implications on laziness. I could have easily learned about this from a more compact online description (the Haskell wiki in particular seems excellent). Hoping that this picks up soon.

I’m liking the problem-based approach. While working through the Starfolks example (counting paths through a lattice where you can only move up and right), I ended up rederiving Vandermonde’s identity by counting in different ways. On the other hand, I don’t think this would have been nearly so obvious to me if I hadn’t already done a lot of counting in the past. There aren’t a ton of worked examples.

Starts out as incredibly elementary. Almost too basic for the level of depth that I anticipate this reaching. However, given the inquiry-based approach, this may be necessary to ensure that all prerequisites are covered. I do like the inquiry-based method so far, but we’ll see how it holds up as the complexity ratchets up.

Actually reading the online preview of the second version.