A New Course Begins

All the functors! – This week has brought some changes that we’re pretty excited about. I’ve planned a whole course on all the functors in Haskell, called Functortown: A Map of the Territory. There is an overview posted on the course main page, outlining what will be covered in the course and explaining which topics you should already be comfortable with before taking it.

• The first lesson is up today. This lesson explores the motivation for functors and introduces the Functor typeclass.

Web Servers – Since the last news post, Chris has posted two new lessons in the Web Servers course.

• Lesson 5 is for getting you familiar with the Response datatype and thinking about API design.
• Lesson 6, posted today, involves writing some slightly more complicated code to manipulate HTTP headers.

The latest lessons do not include videos; we’re going to start reducing the amount of video content on Type Classes for a while so we can get the courses out on a more reliable schedule.

You may have noticed we have always had tags on pages, at the top right of the page under the table of contents. Those have not been clickable in the past, but we have revamped the site a bit to make those tags work as an index. We think of the index much like a book index, a way to look up pages on related topics.

We are also turning my Validation course into a short book. The material is largely the same, with some editing, but will also be extended to include bonus chapters on Coercible and the prisms in the validation package. It has also been reworked to have exercises at the end of each lesson/chapter. The book will be sold on Leanpub, and when we release the first edition we’ll issue a free coupon code to all of our subscribers.

We still expect the Joy of Haskell Desk Reference to be out in June 2019, as we continue to work on that as well.