Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent Introduction to Haskell
The author has obviously explained Haskell to many people before, and drawing from this experience, he creates a book on programming in Haskell that is a quick read -- dare I say, even, a "page turner". Few instructional books clearly explain their subject matter, and fewer still make that subject matter a tasty treat to be savored.
Not everything is covered, to be sure, and a few topics receive hasty treatment. But if Graham comes out with a more advanced book in the series, you can bet I'll preorder it on the reputation of this book alone.
 Confusing, and advocates some very bad practices
I just started to dig into this book, and am very disappointed for a few reasons.
A book that purports to teach a programming language should stick to best practices, yet the first example I read ("game of life") employed a busy-wait loop to slow down the example program. This is a very bad practice, and would earn a computer science student a stern lecture were they caught doing it. It really shakes my faith in the competence of this book's author.
Also, why on earth, rather than using the actual ASCII characters required by the Haskell compilers, does the book use the mathematical symbols they represent in example code? Did the author feel the need to demonstrate his expert understanding of his word processing software? How many hours will be wasted by novice users looking for the "lambda" key on their keyboards?
I strongly recommend waiting for the book "Real World Haskell" - you can already read much of it online while you wait for the printed version.
an excellent starting point
I purchased this book roughly a year ago now, when I approached it then I did find some difficulty but as the months went on, attempting the exercises and writing some of my own small programs, the value of the book has increased and I think I have understood its intentions better.
I recommend this book both as a starting point and as desk reference for the standard prelude for those times when thinking is required, one can lazily flip through the pages while thinking about possible approaches to solving problems.
For those that have had some trouble with this book, it's just a matter of persistence, practice and patience.
The writing style is clear and to the point, thank you Graham Hutton for this excellent starting point and your other contributions to the functional programming arena.
 Good introduction to functional programming in Haskell
I found this small book a good introduction to functional programming in Haskell, and covers basic concepts such as functions, lists, recursion, lazy evaluation. However, it covers monads only cursory and lacked practical examples. For example, it only showed small snippets of Haskell code without some nice applications or coverage of tools about running, testing, debugging programs. I found a beta version of another book on the web at http://book.realworldhaskell.org/beta/ much easier because it actually shows examples in GHC. I am still looking for a bit more advanced reference for Haskell and hope Simon Peyton-Jones writes some book on it.
Good Theory - Bad Examples
This book provides a good introduction into the theory behind the Haskell language. However, it seems that several of the examples are not valid (at least with the version of Hugs 98 I was using). I experienced a lot of frustration when I entered in a program only to see that it wouldn't compile. In summary, the book seems to get the high level concepts across, but is confusing on the details.
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