[mcguire]

Trying to explain monads is misguided. The formal definitions do not help practical understanding (at least without a strong background in category theory, maybe?).

It's better to simply use them until you get the idea: the IO monad is the same sequencing operation as in any traditional programming language, state monads are slightly weaker versions of the same, maybe and error monads are short-circuiting evaluation, and list is much less weird once you get that (and see the "Turn your failures into a list of successes" paper), and by that time you're probably deep into monad transformer territory.

Once you get comfortable with those, you're good to go. Unless the Haskellers have created a bunch of new nifty abstractions to learn.