We've kicked off C9 Lectures with a journey into the world of Functional Programming with functional language purist and high priest of the lambda calculus, Dr. Erik Meijer (you can thank Erik for many of the functional constructs that have shown up in languages like C# and VB.NET. When you use LINQ, thank Erik in addition to Anders).
We will release a new chapter in this series every Thursday.
In Chapter 5, Dr. Meijer introduces and digs into List Comprehensions. In mathematics, comprehension notation is used to construct new sets from old sets. In Haskell, you can create new lists from old lists using a similar comprehension syntax:
[x^2 | x <- [1..5]]
The above notation represents the list [1,4,9,16,25] of all numbers x^2 such that x is an element of the list [1..5]. The <- [1..5] syntax is known as a generator and list comprehensions can have mulitple generators that can have explicit dependencies on other generators. You will also learn about guards, which restrict values created by earlier generators.
You should watch these in sequence (or skip around depending on your curent level of knowledge in this domain):
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Now, we do have a textbook and you should go buy it: The great Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. We worked with the publisher, Cambridge University Press, to get all Niners a 20% discount on the book. Now, you don't need the book to learn a great deal from this lecture series since Graham's website has all the slides and samples from the book as well as answers to the exercises. That said, it's highly recommended reading and you should consider it.
The promotion code is 09HASK and it is vaild on both the Hardback:
9780521871723 and Paperback: 9780521692694. The catalog pages are:
Hardback:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521871723 and the paperback is:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521692694
Note: This special offer is valid until December 31, 2009
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