A good book for the advanced programmer or the absolute beginner, but bloody confusing for intermediate college students.

I got this book for a CS class in college but never used it (professors just love you to waste your money that way). I recently came back to this book after getting really into Python, especially the functional features.
The approach the book takes is more or less instructing someone who knows absolutely nothing about programming in the ways of functional thinking. This makes it perfectly easy for an absolute beginner with no imperative or OOP prejudices to learn Haskell--just as if they were taught hex before decimal they'd catch onto hex real quick.
This is also a great text for someone who's had some functional programming experience (map, filter, reduce, monads) and for whom recursion is a friend. I've become a much better Python programmer (and a better programmer in general) from just scanning the book every time in the bathroom.
However, for a student who's been doing Java or C/C++ for a year or two, this will be extremely confusing. They will already have adopted a certain way of thinking and will have trouble going through this text. This is why this book was useless to me for several years.
But for the advanced guys or the absolute n00bs I'd definitely recommend this book. As far as functional programming books go it's downright lively. My only complaint is that it doesn't really show me any practical things I can do with Haskell (these examples seem hard to find anywhere), such as database or GUI stuff. I mean sure it's cool to do a graph walk incredibly succinctly, but that's not something I'm going to use for work . . .

Other Reviews

• A good book for the advanced programmer or the absolute beginner, but bloody confusing for intermediate college students.
• Great overall, no need for other books, though Monads still ill-explained
• Good gradual introduction; good value for money