[tinco]

The big not-so-secret secret is that you don't have to understand much of Monad theory to enjoy Haskell. If you want to use Haskell as a nice functional language with a great typesystem.

As spopejoy says, Monad is a typeclass, that means every Monad is a type on itself. So you you can get by just learning every monad for its use without ever needing to know the theory that binds them.

The Maybe Monad is just an option type, the list monad is just a list and the IO monad is just a sequence of operations that gets returned to the runtime from the main function. Who cares that they all share a typeclass?