Series Spotlight: Liftoff Series!

Learning Haskell, like learning anything, can be a long and sometimes difficult journey. But every journey starts with a first step! And when you take things step-by-step, it’s not too difficult to make progress. So what is the first thing you should do? That’s what our Liftoff Series is for!

If you’ve never written any Haskell before, this is a great place to start. We’ll walk you through the first steps of learning the language. You don't need to worry about any prerequisites. The series assumes no prior knowledge of Haskell, and walks you through installation. That said, it's important to have some background in programming.

In part 1 of the series, you’ll learn about expressions and types. These form the basic building blocks of Haskell as a language. The structure they create is a radical departure from most non-functional languages.

In part 2 of the series, we’ll learn about code modules and how to write your own Haskell source files. We’ll also learn some of the more complicated elements of function syntax in Haskell. For instance, we’ll explore the differences between how Haskell if statements work compared to other languages. We'll also see Haskell's other options for control flow.

In part 3, we’ll conclude by improving our mastery of the type system. Specifically, we’ll look at how we can create our own types. Again, this is very different from the process you might follow in other languages. But it’s also a lot easier and more flexible!

An excellent addendum to this series is our free Stack mini-course. This will help you learn how to use the Stack tool so you can start building your own Haskell programs. You’ll need this knowledge if you want to get beyond building simple toy projects, so take a look!