An introductory Haskell programming course by Richard Cook

This course will build up enough knowledge and understanding of the Haskell programming language to tackle a real-world problem—something not difficult but not completely trivial. The problem I've chosen is one that I've often tackled, specifically web scraping: pulling web pages off the Internet and extract and manipulating numerical and textual data.

I wrote the original web scraper in Python in about two hours. The Haskell version took a wee while longer, clocking it at around eight, but is superior in nearly every respect.

1 Overview

• Will teach the essentials required to write real programs in Haskell
• Will only dig into mathematical underpinnings as needed to understand real-world programming problems
• Will enable the student to use the tools needed to build real programs and consume Haskell libraries from third parties
• Intend to complement other courses offered by Seattle Area Haskell Users' Group

2 Prerequisites

• This course will use Stack
• The examples have been tested on recent versions of Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu and Centos operating systems
• Please follow setup instructions to install Stack
• Make sure the following example based on the setup guide works:

stack new hello-world simple --resolver=lts-7.8
cd hello-world
stack setup
stack build
stack exec hello-world

If everything is working as expected, the last line should yield the output hello world.

• This course will use the LTS 7.8 snapshot of Stack which uses GHC 8.0.1

3 Course overview

• Part 1
  • What is Haskell?
  • Interactive Haskell
  • Type annotations
• Part 2
  • Functions
• Part 3
  • Algebraic data types
• Part 4
  • I/O
• Part 5
  • do-notation
• Part 6
  • Other
• Parts 7 to 10
  • Under development
• Questions and answers