Our writing is now complete!
August 22nd, 2008 by Bryan O'Sullivan
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.
[...] blog de Real World Haskell anuncia que el libro ya está completo: I just posted the last chapter we had left to write, [...]
Great work guys! Looking forward to picking this book up. Thank you for the wonderful introduction to a wonderful language.
Very nice work !
Just one question : could you please tell us why chapter 30 (A concurrent RESTful web application) has been left off ?
Thanks.
Jonathan.
Thanks, guys.
We dropped the RESTful web app chapter because developing that content was taking too much time and space.
Hi Guys,
I’m going through the book now and it really is great.
Thanks very much for putting it together.
Congratulations!!!!!! The new chapter is really helpful. I posted a few comments and will see if I can add some more.
One request/comment about the whole book, if it’s not too late: it would be useful to have more references in the book to the external literature, about things like type systems, STM, and so forth. Alternatively, a “further reading” section at the end that points to other important books and papers would help a lot. It shouldn’t just be a list of references, but rather it should call attention to particularly important works and make recommendations about what’s worth reading. I’m imagining something like the reading list at the end of Michael Spivak’s book “Calculus”, which suggested enough reading (a dozen or so books) to get through about half of a math degree, giving a paragraph or two of the author’s advice about each book and what types of topics it covered. Some examples:
1) SPJ’s book about functional language implementation, that explains graph reduction, which is important for understanding how Haskell works.
2) Keir Fraser’s PhD thesis about STM
3) SPJ’s paper “tackling the awkward squad” which is what I think of “real world haskell” as basically being synonymous for (and this is why your book is better than any of the earlier ones).
4) Maybe a few words of description and pointers about even more advanced languages like Agda.
Of course you guys are much more familiar with the literature than I am, which is why I’d hope for your recommendations.
looking forward to the book, it a great help for Haskell newbies like me.
Also I was curious when and where the RESTful web app chapter was announced. If possible can we see a draft of if (maybe for the second edition
Thanks a lot.
Will the book be available for purchase in India?
I sure hope so. O’Reilly books are comparatively very popular and visible in bookstores in India (atleast Bangalore). This book will give Haskell its much deserved publicity in my country if its released here.
Looking forward to adding this book to my collection.
> We dropped the RESTful web app chapter because developing that content was taking too much time and space.
Well, save it for a sequel?
Something bad seems to have happened to the comments. In chapter 26 I see many comments that seems to refer to otehr chapters, mainly concurrency and printf.
Congratulation on such hard work!
I am really glad you made that book.
I’ve been reading various tutorials but they tend to be a bit heavy (for me) on the mathematics.
With the size of the book double the size expected, I’m really glad I did a preorder on it before the price goes up
[...] the progress, but also taking input from the community as well. Recently, they announced that the writing was complete and the source was handed off to production. Can’t wait to get my hands on it, but I’ve been [...]