Beginner crash course

The first version of this course was delivered in person at ZuriHac, an annual Haskell hackathon. In 2020, we adapted the course somewhat in order to offer it again even as ZuriHac had to move online in order to accommodate the pandemic.

The beginner workshop at that time was set up such that participants watched a pre-recorded video at the same time and then broke into chat groups, both voice and text, to discuss the video content, ask questions, and share code examples and insights. In keeping with the very free and open spirit of ZuriHac, we decided to release the videos we had recorded for that, but – particularly because the course content has now been liberated from its original context in which we were present to answer questions – we feel it’s important to give some explanation of the design of the course and the content decisions we made.

Typically, this beginner workshop is delivered in six total hours over two days. This amount of time includes time for questions, conversation, and writing some code exercises on your own. It’s not a lot of time, and participants come with a wide variety of backgrounds: some have never programmed before, some have extensive programming experience but zero Haskell, and many participants have made one or more prior forays into learning Haskell. So, this course has never pretended to be a complete, everything you ever needed to know about Haskell course.

Instead, this course tries to focus on a few things that we usually can accomplish in the allotted time for the expected audiences. We make some choices, such as focusing on limited amounts of syntax, that a longer, more thorough introduction to Haskell might not make.

1. Setup
2. Types and functions
3. Basic types
4. Types and functions, continued
5. Basic types, continued

1. Palindromes
2. Main
3. Nonempty strings
4. Mapping to lower case

1. Removing spaces
2. Composition
3. Folds

1. Monoids
2. Functor
3. Monad