Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!

Read the book right now on mybinder.org with this link: (Usually takes a minute to launch)

This is a Jupyter notebook adaptation of the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! by Miran Lipovača.

I learned Haskell from this book in 2014 by following along in GHCI, as the book suggested.

In 2019, the Jupyter notebook format would be a nice way read this book. This is one of the best cases for Theodore Gray's idea of the computational essay, and Andrew Gibiansky has made it possible with IHaskell.

Each chapter of the book is one .ipynb Jupyter notebook file. See the list of chapter files on the left sidebar in JupyterLab.

Each notebook cell depends on cells that come before it, so run the notebooks from top to bottom. I have refactored code to make the examples work in Jupyter, and removed instructions for how to use GHCI. Other than that I have tried to be faithful to the original text.

Miran Lipovača wrote this book and released it to the world under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, which means that the book is free-as-in-speech, and allows us to enjoy the book in notebook format. But that does not mean that the book is free-as-in-beer; it means that you, dear reader, pay for the book under the honor system. If you are honorable and you want to keep living in a world in which honorable artists license their art as Creative Commons, then buy the book.

Thanks also to Paul Vorbach for https://github.com/pvorb/learn-you-a-haskell.

How to run on your local computer in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code has a Notebook UI which you can use to run Jupyter kernels instead of the browser-based JupyterLab or classic Jupyter UI.

Clone this repository with git and cd into the cloned directory

git clone https://github.com/IHaskell/learn-you-a-haskell-notebook.git
cd learn-you-a-haskell-notebook
code .

There is a Docker Visual Studio Code devcontainer configuration in the .devcontainer directory.

When you open Visual Studio Code by running code ., a pop-up dialog will tell you that “Folder contains a Dev Container configuration file. Reopen folder to develop in a container.” Click the button labelled Reopen in Container.

You will then be able to open the .ipynb chapter files in the notebook directory.

How to run on your local computer in JupyterLab in a web browser

Clone this repository with git and cd into the cloned directory

git clone https://github.com/IHaskell/learn-you-a-haskell-notebook.git
cd learn-you-a-haskell-notebook

Then here are three options for running.

1. docker

   docker run --rm -p 8888:8888 -v $PWD/notebook:/home/jovyan/work --name learn-you-a-haskell ghcr.io/ihaskell/ihaskell-notebook:master jupyter lab --ServerApp.token=''

   then open http://localhost:8888 to read the book.

2. podman

   podman run --privileged --userns=keep-id --rm -p 8888:8888 -v $PWD/notebook:/home/jovyan/work --name learn-you-a-haskell ghcr.io/ihaskell/ihaskell-notebook:master jupyter lab --ServerApp.token=''

   then open http://localhost:8888 to read the book.

3. NixOS flake

   nix run . -- --notebook-dir notebook
   

   then the book will open in a browser automatically. If it doesn’t, open the “running at” link.

How to edit notebooks

If you make an improvement to a notebook .ipynb file and you want to save the file and commit the changes and make a pull request to the repository,

1. Maximize the browser window to full screen width, because cell horizontal scroll bar visibility gets saved in the notebook.

2. Run -> Restart kernel and Run All Cells...

3. Save the notebook.

ihaskell-notebook

For more information about the IHaskell Docker image, see https://github.com/IHaskell/ihaskell-notebook