Lambda the Ultimate

The first seven chapters of Hutton's book were phenomenal from a pedagogic standpoint. He introduces the concepts succinctly, and cleanly, with interesting, and even fun examples. As far as the first seven chapters goes, the book is sufficient for learning and understanding the concepts.

Then comes chapter 8, which in my eyes, is a disappointment. In the associated web material he admits that the code in the book will not work. There is help; his tutorial, "Monadic Parser Combinators" is much clearer in presentation, because he explicitly makes use of monads in refactoring the parser. But even in that tutorial, there is an admission, that the above code will not work directly, though he lists some possible remedies.

Conclusion, it may not be wise for someone who has never been exposed to parsers or monads, to go through this chapter alone. The chapter would have been much better for self-study, if monads were mentioned upfront, even without explanation, and a working parser was developed with monads from the ground up. On the other hand, with a good instructor, his presentation would have been great, because it would have showed the learnees the benefits and simplicity of using monads to do the parsing.