New Course: Solve.hs!
A few weeks ago I hinted that, while I hadn't been able to publish consistently for much of this year, I had been working on something important. And now, I'm finally ready for the big reveal!
Today I am excited to announce the release of Part 1 of my new course Solve.hs. This course is focused on problem solving in Haskell. This announcement also kicks off the Black Friday sale week for Monday Morning Haskell, where you can get 20% off any of our courses with the code BFSOLVE23. And if you subscribe to our mailing list, you'll get an even bigger discount, 30% off on everything, including Solve.hs!
Why Problem Solving?
I settled on problem solving as a great topic for a course because it occupies a good middle ground between, on the one hand, super basic setup and syntax (covered by Setup.hs and Haskell From Scratch, respectively), and on the other hand, more complex practical topics covered by courses like Practical Haskell, Effectful Haskell, and Haskell Brain.
Problem solving is a relatively quick and frictionless path to getting familiar with a language (especially one like Haskell that defies many conventions from more common languages). Once you have your toolchain set up, it's not hard to find problems that will quickly stretch your understanding of the language and even teach you some pretty tricky concepts! With problem solving, it's also easier to do a lot of different problems and get a lot of "reps" in, so to speak.
My actual Haskell career trajectory with Haskell went pretty quickly from learning the basics to jumping into practical applications like web servers. This is entirely doable, but it does run the risk of pigeon-holing you into some pretty specific areas of understanding, causing you to skip many of the fundamentals.
Problem solving is a great tool to fill this gap. It forces you to learn about new techniques that you might not need on a particular project, but which will help you grow and be able to apply to future projects. Let's learn a bit more about the course itself.
The Course
This course release is exciting for me because, even just considering the first part, it's the longest and most detailed course I've written since Practical Haskell. It doesn't appear to be that long, consisting of only two modules. But by several important metrics, it actually rivals the 7-module Haskell From Scratch. It has nearly as much lecture material, about as many practice problems, and the amount of code you'll actually have to write for the exercises is quite a bit more!
| Course | Lecture Time | Practice Problems | Solution LOC* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haskell From Scratch | 4h05m | ~180 | 1316 |
| Solve.hs | 3h47m | ~180 | 2587 |
*Solution LOC measures the GitHub diff comparing my answers branches to the original
Solve.hs is good for users with many levels of Haskell experience. Beginner and intermediate Haskellers will benefit a lot from learning the core patterns in this first part, and even experienced Haskellers will find some of the practice problems challenging. To see why, let's look at the two modules currently on offer!
Module 1: Lists and Loop Patterns
In the first module, we'll do extensive work with lists. Lists are one of the basic building blocks of Haskell - the simplest collection type you can have. To use them well, and so become "fluent" in Haskell, you need to familiarize yourself with a lot of different patterns of how to use them.
In Module 1, we'll explicitly name these patterns and draw helpful comparisons to code from other languages. This will help you finally understand how to answer questions like "how do I write a for-loop in Haskell?"
You'll learn large parts of the List API by implementing the type from scratch, as well as dozens of its helper functions. This will help you drill in the patterns of how lists work, and what operations we can (and cannot) do efficiently with them.
Module 2: Data Structures
Once you're well-versed in all the things Haskell can do with lists, it will be time to learn about other structures that allow for different efficient operations. This is the subject of Module 2. Now I've written plenty about Data Structures before. In fact there are a couple ebooks you can check out if you want.
But this module goes way deeper. In Solve.hs, we'll look into how some of these structures are implemented under the hood, and specifically how they're implemented differently in Haskell compared to other languages.
There are plenty of practice problems to help you get a feel for each structure. You'll learn about some of my favorite "derived structures" - abstract ideas that use the core structures under the hood, but express specific operations cleanly. On top of that, you'll get to implement a couple different data structures from scratch, which is super helpful for training yourself to understand how these structures perform in real life.
Part 2 - 2024
I wanted to release Part 1 of this course now, since these two modules on their own can be super impactful for beginning and intermediate Haskellers. Also, Advent of Code is coming up, a time when I have focused this blog's attention on problem solving anyway for the last couple years. So this course makes a perfect match for those of you who want to dive into Advent of Code this year, writing all your solutions in Haskell!
However, since problem solving is such a rich field with many areas to explore, I plan to add two more modules to this course in 2024. Module 3 will cover Essential Algorithms, with a special focus on graph algorithms in Haskell. Then Module 4 will go in-depth with Parsing, since many problem solving contests like Advent of Code do require you to parse your problem input, often from odd formats. I also intend to incorporate some material related to scale and performance testing.
After the full course release, Part 1 will continue to be its own option for purchase. There is, however, no risk in buying Part 1 now. Anyone who purchases Part 1 before the full release will receive a discount coupon for the full course based on what they paid for Part 1.
So, if you're interested, head to the course sales page to learn more and enroll in the course! But first make sure to subscribe to the Monday Morning Haskell mailing list, which will give you a 30% discount code for this and all of our other courses! This offer will only be good until Monday, November 27th, so don't wait!
