I think that I own 7 Haskell books, and there are good parts in all of them. A few of them are great. Why all the love and strong recommendation for a new unpublished book?

I use Emacs, IntelliJ, and TextMate for Haskell. I love all three.

I thought the best part of this article was the coverage of libraries because I find myself to be uncertain of selecting the most appropriate ones. I use a small subset of Haskell but that works for me.

As for why? We make certain you actually learn everything you need to know and we _aggressively_ test and review the material with actual learners. My co-author Julie's first programming language is Haskell, which she has learned from me and while writing the book.

Here's a screenshot from our Zendesk for processing reader feedback and reviews: http://imgur.com/EdpL4ql

We are writing the book because I've been helping people in IRC (#haskell-beginners mostly which floats around 300 users), on Twitter, etc. I saw too many people burn out and give up with the existing resources (free & paid), despite maintaining a guide for learning Haskell with free resources: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell

It's just harder than it needs to be, so we're fixing that. Even the better existing books/resources don't cover nearly enough for somebody to move on to, say, writing a web application.

I wrote about the pedagogical issues with some of the existing resources here: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2014-12-31-functional-education.h...

If you didn't find it difficult to learn Haskell, that's great! But most people find it intensely difficult and I think that's completely unnecessary. I've given a talk on this titled, "Learn Haskell in less than five years" located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9ccYzMbxc