Real World Haskell

I’ll be speaking at ACCU next Wednesday, September 10. Doors open at 6:30pm, and the talk starts at 7pm. The venue is being provided by Symantec.

The topic is “Haskell for the Real World”, and I will talk about using Haskell to address some of today’s toughest programming challenges:

• Delivering high quality software that performs well.
• Scaling effectively on modern multicore systems.
• Refactoring quickly as requirements evolve.

Where to go:

Symantec VCAFE building, 350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road), Mountain View

The DocBook source for the book is now in the hands of O’Reilly’s production team. We sent the first batch of copyedits back a few days ago. The rest will be flowing through over the coming two weeks or so.

At this point, we’re mostly reviewing punctuation, typeface, and grammar fixes from our copyeditor, who is doing a remarkably thorough job. We have little ability to act upon any further feedback through the web comment system.

Over the next few days, I’ll update the book web site to hide all comments posted so far, and take the mention of “beta” out of the various paths and URLs (don’t worry, I’ll add forwarding links, so your existing bookmarks won’t break).

I just posted the last chapter we had left to write, Profiling and optimisation. Please get your comments in by the end of Tuesday, September 2! The response to the previous two has been excellent; we appreciate your help and careful reading.

With that chapter posted, we draw over 15 months of intensive writing to a close. I am very proud of our work. It has been a pleasure to work with John and Don on the manuscript, and Mike has been a great editor. The interest and participation of our readers has made writing this book a uniquely rewarding experience, so we thank you all for your encouragement and help.

It would be a shame to let this milestone pass without some serious geekbait. As geeks, we love numbers, so here are some relating to our work so far.

• We have made exactly 1300 commits to our darcs repository.
• Our DocBook source file is 44092 lines (2042719 bytes) long.
• The current size of the proofs is 686 pages.
• Our examples tree contains 291 Haskell source files, containing 893 code examples. (Yes, we’ll be releasing the whole lot.)
• We have 166 source files of interactions with GHC’s command line interpreter, containing 598 examples.
• We automatically build and run all of our examples, so what you see on the screen (soon to be the page) is code that really works.

How has our system of open, incremental development worked out? In my estimation, it has been a fantastic success, far overwhelming my expectations.

• We have received 7153 comments so far.
• That’s an average of 1.73 comments per paragraph.
• The usual number of technical reviewers for a technical book is 2.
• 748 people have commented so far on our drafts.

Feedback from our readers has had a profound effect on the development of the book. We have received comments from people who have been using Haskell for almost 20 years, from casual hackers, and from people who are just picking up the language for the first time. We have used your input to make our coverage both more correct and more accessible. Thank you all for the generosity you have shown with your time and attention!

Finally, I have a few notes about our production schedule.

We expect to receive the first batch of copyedited proofs early next week. We’ll be turning each batch around in a matter of days. We surprised both ourselves and O’Reilly’s production team by turning in such a huge manuscript. (I think they’d been expecting around 300 pages.) This will increase the duration of the copyedit by a few weeks, so our current estimate of the publication date is around the beginning of November.

Update: Due to a clerical error on my part, a number of comments for chapters 12 and 29 performed a switcheroo. We’ll still make it through them, don’t worry.

On September 27, I will be giving a half-day Haskell tutorial entitled “Real World Haskell” at DEFUN, the new developer track at the ICFP conference. This year’s ICFP and DEFUN will be held in Victoria, Canada.

DEFUN will also host two other Haskell tutorials that we’re very excited about.

• Our friend Andy Gill will be talking about testing Haskell code using QuickCheck, and the use of his new HPC code coverage tool.
• Jefferson Heard will talk about information visualization using Haskell.

DEFUN promises to be a great addition to ICFP. It will offer an excellent way to learn about the practicalities of functional programming, alongside the existing Commercial Users of FP track. We hope to see you there!

Oh, wow. We just got the first PDF proofs in, using O’Reilly’s house style. There’s no index yet, and we still have a chapter to add, but we’re already at 536 pages. The final number will thus be somewhat north of this: maybe 550 pages, instead of the 450 we thought as recently as a day or two ago.

Update: Don noticed that several chapters were missing from the PDF. I’ve fixed this, and now we have 666 pages in the current PDF. As a result, the final count looks like it will be near 700 pages. That pretty well blows my mind.

I just updated the beta site with two new chapters:

• The foreign function interface
• Software transactional memory

We need your help! Please read these chapters as soon as you can, and use the comment system to give us feedback by this Friday, August 22. We will be sending the two chapters to O’Reilly’s production team on Monday. The last incomplete chapter will be online by the end of this week.

This latest refresh of the beta site includes updates to almost every chapter, to reflect the suggestions and comments that so many of you have made. Thanks for your help!

We have added some convenient links to make it easier to preorder the book online. If those links are not convenient for purchasing in your country, just ask for ISBN 978-0596514983 at your favourite bookstore.

Finally, we have received the first rough estimate of a page count from O’Reilly’s production team. They expect the book to be around 450 pages in length. We will follow up with a more accurate estimate, and a better idea of a final release date (currently the end of October), once we get that information.

After a few weeks of silence, here is an update on our recent progress and current work.

We have spent the past few weeks editing chapters in response to the comments of our beta readers. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback. We have now revised about three quarters of the book’s chapters, with the remainder to come over the next week or so.

As for writing, we have just finished the chapter about Haskell’s foreign function interface. If time permits, we’ll post that tonight, and perhaps update the existing chapters to reflect the changes we have been making.

Once the current editing pass is done, we still have two late chapters left to write. The entire manuscript should be drafted by the end of this month.

On the production side, several of our early chapters are proceeding through O’Reilly’s copy editing department. It will still be several weeks before we can give a reasonable estimate of the book’s availability.

(Update 2008-07-17: Everything is back up.)

The server that’s hosting the beta content is misbehaving mysteriously, and is currently down. When it comes back up, I’ll rescue a fresh backup of the comments from it and move the whole lot to a more stable host.

John and I will be in Portland, Oregon next week for OSCON. I’ll be giving a Haskell overview talk on Thursday at 17:20, but I’ll be around for a few days before and after.

Our co-author, Don, actually lives in Portland. If you are based in Portland or visiting OSCON, and you’d be interested in meeting up for a chat with us about the book or other things functional, leave a comment or drop one of us a line.

I’m happy to announce that several booksellers now have Real World Haskell available for pre-order.

Here are some handy links:

Powell’s Books
Borders
Barnes and Noble
Amazon

And finally… that handsome cover (visible at Amazon) features a rhinoceros beetle.