It's hard not to appreciate Paul Hudak, who's at the forefront of research in functional reactive programming. If you've heard of Yampa or Fran, they're children of his, as is Euterpea (which this book is centered on). He also wrote the Haskell School of Expression, an introductory text which touches on multimedia more generally.
IIRC he was diagnosed with a serious form of leukemia awhile back. It's good to see that he's still finding time to do cool things!
He was just starting this book around 2008 when I attended a computer music class he taught. Really great class - opened my eyes to the power of functional programming. I'm really happy to see how far he has been able to take this, despite the leukemia diagnosis.
I'm looking forward to going through this book. Hudak's 'Haskell School of Expression' is one of the books that helped me understand FP, and Haskell in particular. Multimedia applications are not among my current interests, but there were many subtle nuggets in that book that sharpened my functional viewpoint.
Although 'Haskell School of Expression' is written to be an introductory text, I have trouble seeing it that way, in part because of the multimedia aspect. Graham Hutton's 'Programming in Haskell' is a carefully written beginner text.
Functional programming, and Haskell in particular, reward patience. Hudak's and Hutton's books both have a high impact to time spent ratio. I suspect 'School of Music' will as well.
[EDIT - Just looked through it. It is School of Expression rewritten for music rather than multimedia. Cool]
This is exactly what I've been looking for. I've been searching (for years) for a good alternative to SuperCollider and thought Haskell would be great for DSP, but couldn't find a library ready to use. Now I get a lib and a book! :)
I read HSoE a couple of weeks ago to see what more adacamically oriented Haskell books were like. I'm glad I started with RWH, and LYaH covers a lot more ground, but HSoE is excellent in the clarity of what it does cover, in using graphics quite nicely for examples (dated graphics library though), and especially for teaching how to do proofs using Haskell (which also includes teaching well how to evaluate haskell code in your head, and how to think about space leaks).
If the new book does the same, and also teaches something about computer music, it sounds like a real winner.
I like that. My LY and RW are pretty raggedy, and I've basically written my own indexes for those books. (Let's not forget the other books: Hutton, Thompson, Road to Logic, Bird's Pearls (which i haven't read))
I remember staying in a friend's basement flat in South London, and taking baths with HSoE. The book was largely destroyed by the time I got on the plane home, but I was entranced.
