I haven't seen anybody mentioning «Joy of Cats» by Adámek, Herrlich &
Strecker:
It is available online, and is very well-equipped with thorough
explanations, examples, exercises & funny illustrations, I would say
best of university lecture style: http://katmat.math.uni-bremen.de/acc/.
(Actually, the name of the book is a joke on the set theorists' book
«Joy of Set», which again is a joke on «Joy of Sex», which I once found
in my parents' bookshelf... ;-))
Another alternative: Personally, I had difficulties with the somewhat
arbitrary terminology, at times a hindrance to intuitive understanding -
and found intuitive access by programming examples, and the book was
«Computational Category Theory» by Rydeheart & Burstall, also now
available online at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~david/categories/book/,
done with the functional language ML. Later I translated parts of it to
Haskell which was great fun, and the books content is more beginner
level than any other book I've seen yet.
The is also a programming language project dedicated to category theory,
«Charity», at the university of Calgary:
http://pll.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/charity1/www/home.html.
Any volunteers in doing a RENAME REFACTORING of category theory together
with me?? ;-))
Cheers,
Nick
Mark Spezzano wrote:
Hi all,
I'm trying to learn Haskell and have come across Monads. I kind of understand monads now, but I would really like to understand where they come from. So I got a copy of Barr and Well's Category Theory for Computing Science Third Edition, but the book has really left me dumbfounded. It's a good book. But I'm just having trouble with the proofs in Chapter 1--let alone reading the rest of the text.
Are there any references to things like "Hom Sets" and "Hom Functions" in the literature somewhere and how to use them? The only book I know that uses them is this one.
Has anyone else found it frustratingly difficult to find details on
easy-to-diget material on Category theory. The Chapter that I'm stuck on is
actually labelled Preliminaries and so I reason that if I can't do this, then
there's not much hope for me understanding the rest of the book...
Maybe there are books on Discrete maths or Algebra or Set Theory that deal more
with Hom Sets and Hom Functions?
Thanks,
Mark Spezzano.
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