Spotlight: Quick, Focused Haskell Courses

A couple days ago I gave a brief spotlight on the longer, more in-depth courses I've written. The newest of these is Solve.hs, with its focus on problem solving, and the original two I wrote were Haskell From Scratch and Practical Haskell.

After my first two courses, I transitioned towards writing a few shorter courses. These are designed to teach vital concepts in a shorter period of time. They all consist of just a single module and have a shorter total lecture time (1.5 to 2 hours each). You can finish any of them in a concentrated 1-2 week effort. Today I'll give a brief summary of each of these, listed from most abstract to most practical, and easiest to hardest.

Remember, all of these are on sale at 20% off using the code BFSOLVE23 at checkout! You can also subscribe to our mailing list to get an even bigger discount, at 30% off!

Making Sense of Monads

This is for those of you who have been writing Haskell long enough that you've got the hang of the syntax, but you still struggle a bit to understand monads. You might look at parts of Modules 4 and 5 from Haskell From Scratch and think they look useful, but you don't think you need the rest of the course.

Making Sense of Monads really "zooms in" on Module 5. It goes deeper in understanding all of the simpler structures that help us understand monads, and it gives a sizable amount of practice with writing monadic code. You'll also get a crash course on parsing (a common use of monadic operations), and write two fairly complex parsers. So it's a great option if you want a shorter but more concentrated approach on some of the basics!

Effectful Haskell

Effectful Haskell takes a lot of the core ideas and concepts in Making Sense of Monads and goes one step beyond into the more practical realm of applying monadic effects in a program. You'll learn more abstractly what an effect is, but then also the different ways to incorporate polymorphic effects into your Haskell program. You'll see how to use monads and monad classes to swap effectful behaviors in your program, and why this is useful.

This course culminates in a similar (but smaller) project to Practical Haskell, where you'll deploy an effectful web server to Heroku.

Haskell Brain

This course is the hardest and most practically-oriented of this series. You will take on the challenge of incorporating TensorFlow and machine learning into Haskell. This is easier said than done, because TensorFlow has many dependencies beyond the normal packages you can simply pick up on Hackage. So you'll gain valuable experience going through this installation process, and then we'll run through some of the main information you need to know when it comes to creating tensors in Haskell, and building moderately complex models.

Conclusion

So while these courses are shorter, they still pack a decent amount of material! And with the subscriber discount, you can get each of them for less than $30! This offer will only last until Monday though, so make up your mind quickly!