Announcing Practical Haskell!

This week we have an exciting announcement! One of the biggest goals of this blog has been to show Haskell's utility as a production language. Our Practical Haskell course is the culmination of that goal. It assumes you have a decent grounding in Haskell basics, including things like monads and using Stack. To sign up, head over to the course page!

Course Overview

The course consists of five modules. Each module has a series of video lectures and accompanying exercises. There are also "screencast" videos where you get to see the techniques from the lectures in action.

Throughout the course, you'll be building a small web application. In the first module, you'll learn how to store the necessary data for this app. We'll take an in-depth look at Persistent, a Haskell database library. This will show us some of the unique features Haskell can bring to this area.

In module 2, we'll learn how to build a web server that provides an API for accessing our database. We'll see how to write endpoints using the Servant library and how we can test those endpoints. We'll also deploy our application using Heroku.

Module 3 provides a frontend for our app. This frontend will be in Elm, rather than Haskell! These languages have very similar syntax. So you'll learn some special libraries and techniques for integrating them. This way, you'll be able to display all the data you're serving!

The fourth module will teach you some advanced ideas for organizing your code. We'll take a deep dive into monad transformers and also learn about free monads!

We'll wrap up the course with an overview of testing in Haskell. We'll start with some common unit testing libraries and work our way up to more advanced techniques.

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, March 16th, with the release of module 1. We will then release a new module each Monday thereafter. Don't worry if you're busy on a particular week! There's no time limit on doing the material. You'll be able to access the content indefinitely.

Sign-ups for the course will end on Wednesday, March 11th! So don't miss out! Head over to the course page and reserve your spot today!