Name: Thinking Functionally with Haskell
ISBN: 9781107452640

Thinking Functionally with Haskell

Richard Bird is famed for the clarity and rigour of his writing. His new textbook, which introduces functional programming to students, emphasises fundamental techniques for reasoning mathematically about functional programs. By studying the underlying equational laws, the book enables students to apply calculational reasoning to their programs, both to understand their properties and to make them more efficient. The book has been designed to fit a first- or second-year undergraduate course and is a thorough overhaul and replacement of his earlier textbooks. It features case studies in Sudoku and pretty-printing, and over 100 carefully selected exercises with solutions. This engaging text will be welcomed by students and teachers alike.

What Hacker News says

lkutySep 2023

The other book on Haskell by Richard Bird is also excellent: Thinking Functionally with Haskell (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/publications/books/functional/).

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nextosOct 2021

Bird's book and its prequel, Thinking Functionally with Haskell, are outstanding.

His approach of calculating algorithms by performing algebraic transformations is very interesting.

It attracted some interest during the 80s and 90s, but it has faded away as it's too tough to be followed by a human. I wonder if it could benefit from some automation by using e.g. modern synthesis techniques.

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myegorovAug 2018

Not to start a flame war, but imho this is my definition of a "terrible book". Of the everything and the kitchen sink variety. By contrast, I very much enjoyed LYAH, not least for its self-effacing humor. Hutton was too dry for me. There's a less well-known "Thinking Functionally with Haskell" book by Richard Bird that is concise and targets the mathematically inclined crowd.

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jasimOct 2016

I think Richard Bird's Thinking Functionally with Haskell will be an excellent book to learn programming without having access to a computer. It'll teach him how to think about programs as a set of simple equations, and also clearly demonstrates that Data Structure + Algorithms = Programs, a notion that easily gets forgotten to great detriment in imperative programming.

It is very much an introductory text to programming, something that can be picked by someone who has an inclination to the craft but with no prior experience. It doesn't even get into Haskell's powerful type system and sticks to primitives and lists. The intention is to teach the building blocks of programming through small, pure functions.

The text is very conversational, chapters are short and sweet, and have a lot of bite-sized exercises along with their answers which will greatly help a self-learner. It will also be easy to evaluate since functional code don't tend to get very verbose.

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sridcaFeb 2015

The recently released Thinking Functionally with Haskell by Richard Bird includes exercises. I like the fact that this book is a little more rigorous than LYAH.

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smartbitFeb 2018

Thinking Functionally with Haskell, Richard Bird, 2015 [0] states The first edition was titled 'Introduction to Functional Programming', and was co-authored with Phil Wadler. It was published in 1988. This is the one linked and free available. The second edition was titled Introduction to 'Functional Programming using Haskell', published in 1998. The 2015 edition is also available from safaribooksonline [1].

[0] https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/publications/books/functional/

[1] https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/thinking-func...

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