Without a doubt, the math contents of this book were over my head. I originally picked The Haskell Road more for its relation to functional programminWithout a doubt, the math contents of this book were over my head. I originally picked The Haskell Road more for its relation to functional programming than to anything else. For this reason, the chapters on induction, recursion and corecursion were more enlightening and understandable than any other section. For a kid with no formal mathematical training, though, the proofs in this book (mostly those in the later chapters) were often beyond my reach.
If an exercise like the following sounds like fun, you'll enjoy this book:
Show that the relation < on N is the transitive closure of the relation R = {(n, n + 1) | n in N}.
In many chapters, the Haskell exercises are few and far between, but were (for me) a lot of fun:
Give a corecursive program for producing the as a stream.
I misled myself when buying this book, thinking that I could use it to convince myself that time spent coding Python was worth time away from learningI misled myself when buying this book, thinking that I could use it to convince myself that time spent coding Python was worth time away from learning Clojure, Haskell, et al. This book was much more beginner-oriented than I expected, and didn't really provide the evidence I was looking for. A few of the final chapters provided some information about metaclasses, abstract base classes, and special methods that was useful to me. I was disappointed to not find many other details on what makes Python stand out.
Despite my experience with the book, this sort of reading would really be helpful to someone learning their first programming language or returning to programming after some time away....more
Some parts of the book were genuinely useful and interesting, providing introspection into things like closures and the unusual JS prototype model. ThSome parts of the book were genuinely useful and interesting, providing introspection into things like closures and the unusual JS prototype model. The rest of the book, however, concerned itself with pointing out IE loopholes and minor points of things like eval and the DOM API. This may be interesting to some, but most web devs I know nowadays don't need to (and don't want to) worry about these things....more
I've been writing regexes for years, but this book still offered new information on the in-depth workings of regex engines and how to optimize expressI've been writing regexes for years, but this book still offered new information on the in-depth workings of regex engines and how to optimize expressions by taking advantage of the engine's strong areas.
If you think you already have a good understanding of regular expressions, you can safely skip to chapter 4. The author includes cross references everywhere, so you can still catch up on some minor detail you may have missed....more
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