First Steps in Haskell

My goal in this book is to provide a hands-on exposition of functional programming in Haskell, and to explain things using meaningful examples. In order to do this, though, you need to know how to interact with your Haskell system and where to look for information about standard Haskell functions, and you need to have at least some basic understanding of the absolute basics, such as what Haskell syntax looks like and what basic data types you have at your disposal. This chapter introduces you to these foundations. In the next chapter, we'll actually get to work programming in Haskell.