

Today I published an introductory book on Haskell Data Analysis - BinRoo
http://haskelldata.com

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samstokes
This is an excellent landing page for a technical book. I haven't seen this
style before, but the code snippet and details for each chapter gave me a good
idea not just of the book's content, but of its emphasis and assumptions.

It suggested that this was a book about solving practical problems (e.g. all
the bullet points about file formats, integration points like
databases/Twitter/IRC, visualisation), assuming some Haskell knowledge (little
time spent on Haskell concepts) but little machine learning knowledge (bullets
showed elementary topics like MD5 alongside more advanced topics like
perceptual hashing).

Based on this landing page, I bought the book; I probably would not have done
so based only on the title and a synopsis.

~~~
polymatter
I just wanted to say I agree entirely with this. It gives me great confidence
that this book was well thought out when the chapter by chapter snippets are
so clear and concise. I like the drawings too that gives my imagination
something to grab onto and breaks it up a little.

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m0nastic
I'm excited to read this, I just bought a copy.

I'm presently debating between using Haskell or Clojure for data analysis here
at work (or most likely some combination of the two), so the timing couldn't
be better.

~~~
doorhammer
This is a really shallow analysis, and I'm not claiming it's the god given
truth. I've been following clojure for awhile, I've listened to--I think--all
of Rich Hickey's talks. I've also been recently reading more and more about
Haskell. I always come away feeling like they're two of the most "pure"
language I've encountered. I don't mean that in a functionally pure way
(though there's that too) but ideologically and vision-wise. They both just
feel really clean and focussed compared to a lot of languages I use.

I think I lean toward haskell right now just because I'm doing .net full time
and doing .net and anything even remotely related java ecosystem at the same
time would probably make me crazy. It's my own mental hangup, but there it is.

~~~
m0nastic
Yeah, I've followed Clojure from afar for the past two years or so, but
haven't yet had a reason to use it at work. I like a lot about the way the
language is laid out, and whenever I watch one of Rich Hickey's talks I find
myself instinctively wanting to sell all my possessions and walk the earth
handing out "Data is Code, Code is Data" tracts. The few times it's seemed
like Clojure might be a good fit for something small, I've ended up using
Racket (for whatever reason I find all the infrastructure around writing and
deploying Racket to be less cumbersome than all of Clojure's Java-ness)

So far, I've written all the "collection" type stuff in my system in Haskell,
and I'm glad I ignored everyone's hemming and hawing about it, because it was
actually a really pleasant experience. Now that I'm gathering a lot of
disparate data, I'm in the "what the hell do I do with it?" phase of my
project. I'm trying to resist sucking it all into Hadoop (partly because I'm a
one-person operation and even a small Hadoop cluster would be larger than all
of the systems that are generating the data that I'm monitoring, and partly
because I can keep about a years worth of data comfortably in memory).

So I'm basically using this as an opportunity to try out whatever kinds of
data analysis I think sound interesting, and then hopefully learning what is a
good fit and what isn't. This is all uncharted territory for me, and I'm
fortunate to be in a position where I can do what I want and don't have any
time pressures.

I figure I can try to use this data to learn about statistical modeling, graph
analysis, and machine learning. For the time being, I'm favoring Haskell for
this, but that's not really any type of requirement. I just find that I enjoy
Haskell a lot right now, so I should see how far I can go before the honeymoon
ends and the awfulness is revealed.

~~~
doorhammer
Nice.

Sometimes I feel like programming paradigms are philosophical sects and I like
thinking about them more because they can be incredibly abstract but have
really concrete applications.

Glad to hear that you're digging haskell. The initial push into a language
always has me a bit nervous, especially with something like haskell where I
feel like I really need to dig in to get the feel for it. I know they say you
don't need to know category theory to appreciate it, but I'm pretty interested
in it anyway.

I'm sort of in a similar position (except in a corporate job). I have my day
to day responsibilities, but I can keep those at bay with some diligence. I
also have access to lots of really interesting data (I work for a really large
retailer and can access 100% of our chat transcripts, for instance). It makes
me really interested in text analysis, clustering, etc, and while there are
other languages that seem like they might make more sense, pragmatically, this
would be a side track and I think using haskell would be more interesting for
myself, especially if I end up doing most of the work on it in my spare time,
as kind of a for-fun but useful project.

Good luck with your data. Let me know if you decide to walk the earth talking
about nonduality in programming; maybe I'll join you.

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hikarudo
Thank you for writing this! I just bought an ebook copy.

I found it weird that Packt Publishing changed the currency from USD to
British pounds when I input my address, which is in Brazil.

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doorhammer
Nice! I've been wanting to get further into haskell (I'm a newb with it) and
get into some data analysis/machine learning, specifically on text. Going to
pick up a copy of this.

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samstokes
Any plans for a Kindle or other ebook version? This looks like a fun
presentation of an interesting topic, but I'd love to read it electronically
on a laptop so I can try out the examples.

~~~
BinRoo
Yup! The eBook is here: [http://www.packtpub.com/haskell-data-analysis-
cookbook/book](http://www.packtpub.com/haskell-data-analysis-cookbook/book)

~~~
avitous
Easy enough to get it onto a Kindle after buying from the Packt site, but +1
to looking into getting it on Amazon's Kindle store as dealing with Packt was
less than stellar.

On first visiting Packt site (thru link on your website) the paper+ebook
bundle was shown as $43.99, and I sometimes spring for those if they're
discounted enough, especially pre-order (as this is, or used to be anyway). On
clicking through that to add to cart, it showed up as $54.99, and on going
back to original page it now showed price at $54.99 also. Now the eBook showed
up as $9.99 (don't recall what it was on original version of page) so I just
went for that instead, as that was pretty well discounted... and it shows up
as $10.00 when added to the shopping cart, not $9.99. Upon that, on completing
purchase they announced a failure to deliver email to my supplied address
(very rarely an issue.) hahaha not worth pinging Packt over a $.01 difference,
and I suspect the earlier price changing issue might have been a sale
promotion that was changing to a different price effective today (publication
date?) or thereabouts, and perhaps old versions of the page were being
served... but still... good thing Packt takes Paypal as that kind of thing
leaves me a bit disinclined to supply them with my CC number...

Anyway, once purchased on Packt's site, they have an 'Email to Kindle'
delivery option which worked within a few minutes.

Book looks very interesting, and likely a great way to dive in and learn
Haskell. Looking forward to it!

~~~
samstokes
I got the same error message - "Unable to send e-mail. Please contact the site
admin, if the problem persists." Packt also signs me up to 5 newsletters (not
that Amazon doesn't, but that's a problem I already had :)).

Still, an ebook this substantial for $10 is awesome. I hope the Packt discount
isn't eating into the author's profits :(

~~~
mark_l_watson
I bought the book for $10 also. Yes it does cut into the author's profits, but
tech book authors generally don't write motivated for making a lot of money
:-) Rather, the advantages are sharing knowledge and meeting a lot of cool
people. I have written several books, and writing is a pathway to meeting
interesting people.

~~~
BinRoo
Agreed! :)

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harry8
Out of interest, why not just self publish on the net avoiding the whole money
angle altogether? Is there another advantage in going down that route if it
basically doesn't pay?

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mark_l_watson
Hello Nishant, I bought the book today and it looks very useful. Thanks! I am
in the process of using Haskell for most of my new projects after using
Clojure for years.

~~~
BinRoo
Hi! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me!

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jsw97
Exciting to see this, but it's painfully clear how much work there is to be
done for Haskell to be a competitor to, for example, what is available in
Python.

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superfunc
In what capacity? Speed, ease of use, libraries, safety?

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S4M
libraries. I expect Python and R to have _much_ more available libraries for
machine learning than Haskell/

~~~
jsw97
Exactly. There is not yet a pandas equivalent, there is no scikit-learn, etc.
Hopefully this will happen.

~~~
superfunc
Fair enough, I just wasn't sure what you meant.

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minimaxir
Why do the UI elements shake on hover?

~~~
BinRoo
My naive UI decisions. I'm no designer, haha :)

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codygman
For what it's worth I thought they were cool ;)

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losvedir
Looks very interesting. I briefly skimmed the code samples on GitHub for
Chapter 3 (about strings) and was surprised to see no mention of Text or
ByteString. Surely those are integral for real world Haskell use when dealing
with strings?

~~~
BinRoo
ByteString and Text are introduced in passing when used in other recipes, but
there aren't dedicated recipes for them specifically.

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Rickasaurus
This is awesome. Thank you!

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mantazer
congrats man. time to publish fart app!

