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Get a practical, hands-on introduction to the Haskell language, its libraries and environment, and to the functional programming paradigm that is fast growing in importance in the software industry. This book contains excellent coverage of the Haskell ecosystem and supporting tools, include Cabal and Stack for managing projects, HUnit and QuickCheck for software testing, the Spock framework for developing web applications, Persistent and Esqueleto for database access, and parallel and distributed programming libraries.

You´ll see how functional programming is gathering momentum, allowing you to express yourself in a more concise way, reducing boilerplate, and increasing the safety of your code. Haskell is an elegant and noise-free pure functional language with a long history, having a huge number of library contributors and an active community. This makes Haskell the best tool for both learning and applying functional programming, and Practical Haskell takes advantage of this to show off the language and what it can do.

What You Will Learn

Get started programming with Haskell

Examine the different parts of the language

Gain an overview of the most important libraries and tools in the Haskell ecosystem

Apply functional patterns in real-world scenarios

Understand monads and monad transformers

Proficiently use laziness and resource management

Who This Book Is For

Experienced programmers who may be new to the Haskell programming language. However, some prior exposure to Haskell is recommended.

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Part I: First Steps

1. Going Functional

2. Declaring the Data Model

3. Increasing Code Reuse

4. Using Containers and Type Classes

5. Laziness and Infinite Structures

Part II: Data Mining

6. Knowing Your Clients Using Monads

7. More Monads: Now for Recommendations

8. Working in Several Cores

Part III: Resource Handling

9. Dealing with Files: IO and Conduit

10. Building and Parsing Text

11. Safe Database Access

12. Web Applications

Part IV: Domain Specific Languages

13. Strong Types

14. Interpreting Offers with Attributes

Part V: Engineering the Store

15. Documenting, Testing, and Verifying

16. Architecting Your Application

17. Looking Further
Back Matter: Appendix: Time Travelling with Haskell

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Alejandro Serrano Mena is working towards his PhD thesis in the Software Technology group in Utrecht University. He is passionate about functional programming, and has been coding Haskell for personal and professional projects for more than five years. During his college years he was active in an association promoting functional languages among students, giving talks and helping programmers get started in the functional paradigm. In 2011 he took part in the Google Summer of Code program, enhancing the Haskell plug-in for the popular development environment Eclipse. His current position involves research for enhancing the way in which developers get feedback and interact with strong type systems such as Haskell´s.

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