Hello,
I'm wondering if there exists any writing which approaches learning a functional language (Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, whatever) from the perspective of creating real applications in it; something similar to the book Beginning Python, which acquaints you with that language and then walks you through creating a simple GUI app, CGI bulletin board, arcade game, etc. with it.
I've been intrigued by these languages for some time, but never had much patience with the standard language-learning approach that drills the fundamentals into you and concludes "okay, now you find something practical to do with all this knowledge! you'll probably have to find and learn some libraries since we didn't show you any!", thus SICP and such are beyond the ability of my weak will. Since there seems to be a recent cry of funclangs aren't useless! I wondered if there might be a book, or at least some web tutorials, that would be better suited for me.
“Please don't assume Common Lisp is only useful for Databases, Unit Test Frameworks, Spam Filters, ID3 Parsers, Web Programming, Shoutcast Servers, HTML Generation Interpreters, and HTML Generation Compilers just because these are the only things happened to be implemented in the book Practical Common Lisp.—Tobias C. Rittweiler, Lisp Programmer