San Francisco, CA, March 24, 2011—Long prized by researchers and academics for its elegance and mysterious power, Haskell is like no other programming language in use today. Whether driving applications for Google and Facebook or powering the latest innovative video games, Haskell does it all—with less code and fewer errors than other languages.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! (No Starch Press, April 2011, 400 pp., $44.95, ISBN 9781593272838) tackles the wide world of Haskell in a fun and light-hearted way. Haskell sage Miran Lipovača uses humor and quirky illustrations to reveal the wonders of Haskell, offering dozens of wacky examples that take readers from the basics of types, recursion, and higher-order functions to such mythical Haskell constructs as applicative functors, monads, and zippers.

"With Haskell, you can do more with less," Lipovača says. "Its unique style will force you to think differently about programming, and that will make you a better coder. But because Haskell takes a different approach to programming than most other languages, people sometimes find it hard to learn. Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! was written for those people."

As readers follow along with exercises like "Vector von Doom" and "Error Error on the Wall," they'll learn how to:

• Use purely functional programming techniques to avoid side effects and other destructive modifications
• Manipulate infinite sets of data with lazy evaluation
• Organize programs into types, type classes, and modules
• Interact with the outside world using Haskell's elegant Input/Output system

With highly entertaining examples, plenty of original artwork, and a never-ending stream of pop culture references, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! is sure to turn even the most die-hard imperative programmer into a hardcore Haskeller.