[kitd]

One of the reasons I liked the Haskell Wikibook [1] when trying to learn Haskell was that it didn't concern the reader with the IO monad until much later. It just presented 2 forms of using the language, a) normal functional style, b) an "imperative" "do" style, and then showed how they could be used together and when.

That was enough to do most basic tasks and only later was it explained why they can't be mixed directly.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell