This book is a relief! I wish I had such a book for every new language I want to learn. After years of suffering from the
"We-want-to-cater-for-everybody-particularly-beginning-programmers" syndrome of technical book makers I had given up hope that someone would write and publish a book that tries to be concise and goes to the heart of matters as directly as possible, with as little text as possible. Systematically introducing language constructs, clear outline of what they are, terse examples that illustrate just the concept at hand. This is the way I, being a programmer for years, want to pick up a new language. Even if I would not care about Haskell in particular (which is not the case), I would have loved to buy this book, just as a prototypical book about a programming language that I always wanted to have. I appreciate the effort going in such books as "Real World Haskell" by O'Sullivan et al., hoping that there are people that really benefit from it. But for me, it is just dead-tiring to condense the least insight from pages over pages of text. This is just not the way for me to learn a language. I gladly accept that Hutton's book does not cover each and every detail of Haskell, I even gladly accept idiosyncrasies like using the Greek lambda character in the code examples (look in the back of the book for the table of symbols) - because these are all things that I can easily amend from standard and online docs and materials. This book gives me a head start on Haskell so I get all the basic ideas and concepts, and getting them *fast*. I just don't have the time (or the patience) to sift through hundreds of pages to learn a language. It's boring, it's tiring, and it's inefficient. I wish more publishers would pick up this concept and offer books along just the same line, targeting people *with* programming experience.

For everybody that shares this sentiment, I cannot recommend this book high enough.