Not to knock LYAH, but I personally think it stops at a place that would leave newcomers a little ill-equipped to work on haskell projects, considering there are concepts (like monad transformers) that nearly every modern haskell project is going to make some use of that aren't covered. Pedagogically, I think its great that it takes some of the intimidation out of learning something that could otherwise seem very alien and academic.
These days, I recommend the book "Haskell Programming From First Principles" [1]. It's still a work in progress, but its already probably the best haskell book available right now. Just be aware that its a bit lengthy (1000+ pages) and that many of the chapters aren't necessary for learning haskell, but may make the going easier.
I also highly recommend using Stephen Diehl's "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell"[2] which covers a huge amount of pragmatic advice on style, library use, GHC extension use, etc.
I'm not sure I like LYAH as a practical resource: It's silly and might put people at ease, but I wouldn't feel comfortable writing a database or parsing tool or compiler after reading it.
Real World Haskell is better for these, but is a little dated by now.
LYAH is really good for getting you over the first big humps of learning Haskell, if you've never learned a language like Haskell before. I still really like it's explanation of monadic values. It builds up to them in a nice way. If you can pull open a GHCi session while reading that portion of the book and play around on the interpreter while reading it, you'll learn some good stuff. (As with many programming books, it may not seem logical, but I recommend typing out all the examples you find yourself. It works.)
It does not itself teach you much practical stuff. But if you learn what is in LYAH, you'll be pretty close to what you need to pick up most of the practical libraries in Haskell and understand the API level enough to use it, because once you get over that particular difference of Haskell's libraries, you can start working with them like you would any other language's libraries, and incrementally fold in the "Haskell special sauce" as you go, while you are at least learning things instead of stuck adding numbers together and filtering lists and all of the other handful of things you can do without files, network, or anything else you need an IO-based library for.
I agree, I was immediately turned off by Learn You a Haskell, it felt way to dense to me. This looks like a promising and more approachable(in my opinion) book:
These days, I recommend the book "Haskell Programming From First Principles" [1]. It's still a work in progress, but its already probably the best haskell book available right now. Just be aware that its a bit lengthy (1000+ pages) and that many of the chapters aren't necessary for learning haskell, but may make the going easier.
I also highly recommend using Stephen Diehl's "What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell"[2] which covers a huge amount of pragmatic advice on style, library use, GHC extension use, etc.
[1] http://haskellbook.com
[2] http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/