Real World Haskell

You’ve been able to get Real World Haskell in a form useful on a Kindle for awhile now, from O’Reilly directly.

Now, RWH is also available for purchase for the Kindle directly from Amazon’s Kindle store — and has a new Kindle Edition page on Amazon. So if you have a Kindle, you can now purchase RWH directly from your Kindle, or have it automatically installed to your Kindle after buying it at Amazon. The Kindle Edition is currently $31.99.

The O’Reilly digital edition is, of course, still available at $39.99. Their edition gives you DRM-free files, and a single purchase gives you multiple formats: PDF, .mobi (Kindle), Sony, iPhone, etc. If you use Safari Books Online, RWH is available there too.

And of course, you can still get a shiny copy to actually sit on your desk. I have one on my desk at work, and still have to explain the beetle on the cover quite regularly. (The explanation is on page 671, right after the index).

I’m excited about the Kindle version. I’ve been reading waaaaay too much since I got my Kindle back in March. I think the Kindle DX would be especially good for a book like this, to reduce wrapping code examples and tables.

Many of you already know that if you go to the O’Reilly page for Real World Haskell, you can buy RWH as an ebook. If you do that, you get access to it in several formats immediately: PDF, ePub for the iPhone Stanza reader, and mobi for the Kindle or MobiPocket.

Unfortunately, the Kindle 1 lacked support for some features, such as <pre> tags, that were required for good formatting of technical books. Therefore, although O’Reilly posted a .mobi file from the beginning, the experience on the Kindle 1 wasn’t as good as they would have liked.

The Kindle 2 has improved things in this area. I’m happy to report that O’Reilly has updated the .mobi file on their site to work better with the Kindle 2. I’ve tested it on my Kindle 2, and it works pretty well, though there are a few lingering formatting issues. If you own a Kindle 2, you can buy the ebook from O’Reilly and download the .mobi file. If you already bought the RWH ebook, you can download the updated .mobi file for free from your O’Reilly Emedia page.

I believe that O’Reilly also intends to make Real World Haskell available on the Amazon Kindle store, though this may still be some weeks off yet.

I’m delighted to announce that at the SD West expo tonight, we were awarded the Jolt Award for “Best Book, Technical”, for Real World Haskell. It is wonderful to see our work recognised in this way. Thanks to everyone who has made our success possible! (Full award announcement).

Bryan recently spoke to O’Reilly about changes in Haskell from its inception to now, and how the language and community have evolved as it’s become more practical to write real world software in Haskell. See the full interview here. In related news, the 1000th Haskell package was uploaded to Hackage. Well done to all involved!

In a recent interview with O’Reilly, John Goerzon explained how Real World Haskell came to be, the special magic which makes Haskell worth learning, and how to change your mindset to make learning possible. Read the full interview.

This morning Don had the chance to talk with Michael Wrinn and Aaron Tersteeg from Intel’s Multicore Software Development podcast about Haskell and multicores, parallel programming, and functional programming in industry. Enjoy! Listen to the full interview (15 minutes).

Yesterday, Pat Eyler of “On Ruby” published an interview with all three RWH authors, covering a broad range of issues relating to Haskell, functional programming, communities and technology adoption. The interview received a warm response online:

I like the focus on practicality. It makes Haskell’s wide adoption seem realistic.

You can read the interview here.

In other news, we’re proud to announce that RWH is a finalist for the Jolt Awards. The Jolt Awards recognise software, technical books and other tech stuff that is ahead of the curve, or disruptive in some way, and is considered by some to be the Oscars of the our industry, so we’re happy to make the cut!

Also interesting is that two functional programming books as finalists (discussed on LtU). A seachange.

RWH now has a Twitter account where updates about the book and other not-quite-blog worthy news will appear. The authors and the broader Haskell and FP community, are also largely on Twitter, if you want to keep up to date on events in Haskell land. We’ve also had a lot of micro-reviews and news about the book on Twitter, from readers all over:

• Real World Haskell is awesome. Haskell is also awesome.
• Just won “RealWorldHaskell” in the #kplug book raffle.
• Going through the RWH exercises is fun

Thanks everyone! And see you online.

Haskell all over the world:

• ikegami in #haskell reports that his copy of RWH arrived in Japan today (and looks to be #1 in language books on Amazon Japan at the moment).
• doublec sent us the following photo of RWH on his laptop, phone and incarnated, from New Zealand
• Jeff and Armand independently reported that RWH is making its way through Canada
• Ganesh reported that Amazon.co.uk was now shipping copies again, after running out earlier this week.
• And as the snow starts to fall here in Portland, Oregon, new copies have appeared at Powell’s Technical, after selling out earlier this week. Hooray!

Real World Haskell now appears to be on bookstore shelves. At least, there are several copies at the local Powell’s Technical store in Portland, OR, including a stack at the front desk, interestingly.

Here we are, between SoE and CoFP (the book I began my programming career with).

In other news, there’s now >130 people on the RWH Book Club, which surprised all involved, I think. Thanks everyone!