Ben’s Reviews > Haskell Programming From First Principles > Status Update

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.

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.