We have many ways to start learning Haskell. You could come to this book from pure mathematics, or from theoretical underpinnings of functional programming, or from practical tutorials. Consequently, Haskell beginners have very different backgrounds. In this part, we’ll fly over the main building blocks for Haskell programs—namely, functions, types, type classes, modules, projects, and external packages—to make sure that we are on the same page before diving deeper into Haskell.
Even though there should be nothing new here for a junior Haskell developer, we’ll still talk about plenty of good practices ranging from using Text instead of String and looking for help to the pragmatics of using abstractions in Haskell. In the last chapter of this part, we’ll apply all the essential Haskell components to develop a standalone application that reports stock quote data.