[creichert]

> Terrible book.

Definitely overstated and not good advice for beginners.

My advice to beginners would be:

- Read all the Haskell books available at your disposal. (In addition to LYAH and the Hutton book, I would say Learning Haskell From First Principles and Get Programming with Haskell are great, https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-haskell, http://haskellbook.com/)

- When you hit something that doesn't make sense in one source, try referencing it in another source.

- When you have some experience writing programs in Haskell, refer to some older books like Real World Haskell. There may be a few issues compiling the examples, but nearly all the techniques in the book are still widely used and you learn about the language has progressed in the last few years. This gives you a compass to read and maintain older Haskell source code).

- Read as much Haskell code as you can from popular libraries (Pandoc, XMonad, and smaller libs as well).

[ilovecaching]

Beginners want a clear place to start learning from. All those things you said are overwhelming and unnecessary. Some of your recommendations would be fine as next steps, but to start with, just read Hutton's book. It is small enough to be read in just a few days.

[derefr]

I think there are two different definitions of "beginner" being used here.

1. Someone who has never programmed before, and is perhaps young. Someone who has to be guided. A novice.

2. Someone who is new to this particular language, but is experienced at programming generally; who is attempting to learn the language to use it "in anger" (i.e. with a specific goal in mind and a timeline for that goal); and who is willing to "do whatever it takes" to learn the skill. A journeyman beginning a new path.

A novice needs a definitive textbook. A journeyman-beginner, on the other hand, needs definitive primary sources, however scattered.

If you're a high-school student learning precalculus, what do you need? A math textbook.

If you're a post-graduate student learning some specific arcane sub-discipline of math to see whether it could be used to solve the novel problem you've decided to do your thesis on, what do you need? Primary sources. All the journal papers in that field you can get your hands on. There's no one textbook that could possibly help you; the only truth you will find is the truth "between the lines" of everything you read.

[dorkwood]

I think this is good advice for learning any topic in general. Learn from a diverse range of sources.

When I was first learning to code I can remember deciding to stick with one learning resource so as to not overwhelm myself. Eventually I hit a road block and wasn’t able to push past it. I blamed myself for not being able to understand what I was reading. I wasn’t smart enough.

When I tried again years later, instead of sticking with one resource I flicked between several different ones at once. Seeing how different people explained the same concept was extremely helpful in getting things to “click”.

[f0rgot]

It is uncanny how close to my own experience the process you just described is.