Announcing: Haskell From Scratch Beginners Course!

This week we have a huge announcement we’ve been working towards for a long time. One of the main goals of this blog has been to create content to make it easy for newcomers to learn Haskell. We’ve now reached the culmination of that goal with our brand new Haskell From Scratch course. This online course will teach you the basics of using and writing Haskell. It assumes no prior knowledge of Haskell, but you should have at least some programming background. To sign up, head over to the course page.

Course Overview

The course consists of seven modules. Each module has a series of video lectures and accompanying exercises. In the first module, we’ll go over the fundamental structure of the language. We’ll take an in-depth look at how we compose programs by using expressions. Then we’ll see how the type system affects what we can do with those expressions.

In module 2, we’ll try to build a deeper mastery of the type system by learning how to construct our own types. We’ll also see how Haskell’s typeclass system lets us capture common behavior between types.

Module 3 deals with lists and recursion. Haskell doesn’t use for-loops like you have in mainstream languages. Instead, we tend to solve problems with recursion. There's a clear, recognizable pattern to recursion. We'll use Haskell's list structure to help understand this pattern.

In module 4, we’ll take our first steps towards learning about monads and writing real programs. We’ll learn about the IO monad, whose functions allow us to do more interesting things. We'll see how to get user input, manipulate files and even use threads.

In module 5, we’ll take what we learned from writing IO code and apply it to learning about other monads. We’ll start by learning about other kinds of functional data structures. Then we’ll use these patterns to help us learn this most dreaded of Haskell concepts (it’s actually not bad!).

Module 6 deals with the complications of similar-looking data. We have many different ways of representing numbers or strings, for example. And each representation can have a different type. This presents a lot of unique challenges for us as Haskell developers. We’ll explore these more in this module.

Finally, we’ll wrap the course up by learning the "Haskell" approach to problem solving. We'll look at some common programming problems and see how to solve them in Haskell. We’ll consider paradigms like memoization and dynamic programming.

Besides the course material, there will also be a Slack group for this course. This will be a place where you can get help from myself or any of your fellow classmates!

Course Schedule

The course will launch on Monday, September 3rd, with the release of module 1. We will then release a new module each Thursday and Monday thereafter. Don’t worry if you’re busy on a particular week! You’ll be able to access all old content indefinitely.

Now, sign-ups for the course will end on Wednesday, August 29th! So don’t miss out! Head over to the course page and reserve your spot today! If you’re not sure yet about starting with Haskell, you can also download our Beginners Checklist. It’ll give you the tools you need to try the language out!