Haskell is a purely functional programming language used commonly in academia and research. It is geared towards the functional programming paradigm, meaning that functions in Haskell resemble their mathematical counterparts more closely than other imperative programming languages. Along with other distinct features like laziness, algebraic data types, and monads, learning Haskell opens you up to a whole other way of coding.
In this Best Courses Guide (BCG), I’ve picked the best free online courses to learn Haskell from over 220 Haskell courses on Class Central. These courses are created by well-known institutions: the University of Helsinki, Nottingham, and Penn among others. We’ve also thrown in a few super offerings from YouTube and independent providers for good measure.
Click on the shortcuts for more details:
- Which Haskell Course Is Right for You?
- What is Haskell?
- Why You Should Trust Us
- Courses Overview
- How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
Which Haskell Course Is Right for You?
What is Haskell?
Haskell is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language used for teaching, research and industrial applications. Named after the logician Haskell Curry, it first appeared in 1990 as an open source alternative to other proprietary programming languages. It remains one of the best-known functional programming languages, though it sits well down the mainstream popularity charts: as of August 2026 it ranks 48th on the Tiobe Index. Learn Haskell for the way it will change how you write code, not for the size of its job market.
Haskell is purely functional, which means that functions do not update or modify variables and state. This gives the programmer comfort as they’ll know that the code they write will not modify anything outside their body. It is also statically typed at compile time while at the same time having type inference, so you can ensure that no type errors occur during run time. And with other cool features like concurrency and laziness, Haskell has a lot of things going for it.
Why You Should Trust Us
Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 100 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 250,000 online courses and 250,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.
Courses Overview
- All nine of the courses in this guide are free
- Three of them assume no programming background at all (Helsinki, Kovanikov, and Type Classes). Five expect you to have programmed in some other language first, and Exercism works at any level
- Six are text-based and three are video courses, so there is a format here whichever way you prefer to learn
- Class Central lists more than 220 Haskell courses, but most of them are conference talks rather than teaching material. The nine below are the ones built to actually teach you the language.
Best In-Depth Haskell Course For Beginners (University of Helsinki)
Haskell MOOC is a free text-based online course on the Haskell programming language for beginners to programming. The course is split into two parts: Part 1 focuses on the basics of Haskell in the pure functional programming context and Part 2 will introduce Input/Output (I/O) and monads.
The course also has an active Telegram channel where you can ask for help if needed.
No prior knowledge of programming is required to take this course, although knowing a programming language is helpful.
What you’ll learn:
- Fundamentals of Haskell and functional programming
- Advanced concepts: recursion, higher-order functions, algebraic data types
- Key Haskell features: laziness, purity, I/O operations
- Complex topics: functors, applicatives, and monads.
The University of Helsinki has published many other free high-quality MOOCs like Elements of AI and Python Programming.
| Institution | University of Helsinki in collaboration with Nitor |
| Instructor | Antti Laaksonen, John Lång, and Joel Kaasinen |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 100 hours |
| Exercises | Quizzes and programming exercises |
| Credits | 10 ECTS credits for Helsinki students |
| Certificate | None |
Best University-Level Videos For Programmers (University of Nottingham)
Functional Programming in Haskell is an introductory program on Haskell by Professor Graham Hutton from the University of Nottingham.
In this free video playlist, you’ll learn how to code in the functional style with Haskell. By the end, you’ll have a strong grasp of both the Haskell programming languages and functional programming paradigm.
To take this course, you should have some experience with imperative programming (variables, control structures, and data structures).
What you’ll learn:
- Core principles of functional programming and Haskell syntax
- Advanced concepts: typeclasses, recursion, higher-order functions
- Practical applications: list comprehensions, I/O operations
- Haskell’s lazy evaluation behavior
- Transition from imperative to functional programming paradigms.
You can find the course web page at Functional Programming (nott.ac.uk). The next course you should take after this course is Advanced Functional Programming in Haskell, where it consolidates and solidifies your knowledge of functional programming.
| Provider | YouTube |
| Instructor | Graham Hutton |
| Textbook | Programming in Haskell – 2nd Edition |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 10 hours |
| Views | 238K |
| Exercises | Code demos |
| Certificate | None |
Best Basics-to-Advanced Video Series (Philipp Hagenlocher)
Most Haskell video series stop shortly after they reach monads. Haskell for Imperative Programmers reaches monads in episode 17 and then keeps going for another 26 episodes, which is what makes it the most complete free video course in this guide.
Philipp Hagenlocher’s episodes are short and tightly scripted, usually ten to twenty minutes, and the whole series comes to around 12 hours. The first half is the tour you’d expect: functions and types, recursion and guards, lists and tuples, higher-order functions, currying, composition, folds, datatypes, records, typeclasses, Maybe, IO. The second half is the part you won’t easily find elsewhere for free, covering the things you actually hit when you write real Haskell.
As the title says, this one is written for people who already program in an imperative language, so it explains Haskell by contrast with what you already know rather than teaching programming from scratch.
Three episodes are given over entirely to working through exercises, so you get to see problems solved rather than just concepts explained.
What you’ll learn:
- Haskell fundamentals: types, recursion, pattern matching, higher-order functions, folds
- Typeclasses, records, custom datatypes, and the difference between data, type and newtype
- IO, type inference, monads, and monad transformers
- Laziness in practice: strictness, thunks, seq, weak head normal form, and deepseq
- Concurrency and parallelism: threads, semaphores, and software transactional memory
- The working toolkit: QuickCheck, exceptions, modules, Cabal, compiling binaries, and profiling
- A closing run at the theory: category theory, arrows, induction and termination proofs, and formal verification with Isabelle.
The series has no exercises of its own beyond those three episodes, so pair it with the Exercism track below once you’re a dozen or so episodes in.
| Provider | YouTube |
| Instructor | Philipp Hagenlocher |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 12 hours |
| Videos | 43 |
| Views | 903K |
| Exercises | Three dedicated exercise episodes |
| Certificate | None |
Best Intro to Haskell for Programmers (Dmitrii Kovanikov)
Haskell and Functional Programming course for complete beginners goes through the fundamentals of Functional Programming (FP), Haskell Syntax and teaches you skills for solving problems in the functional style. By the end of the free course, you’ll be able to write a simple program in Haskell that interacts with the real world (e.g. search a substring in a file, count the number of files with the specified extension, etc).
No prior knowledge of FP or Haskell is required to take this course.
It’s a compact four-lecture course, each roughly an hour, with exercises to work through in between. The authors have since stopped reviewing submitted solutions, but every lecture, slide deck and exercise remains free and publicly available, and the exercises ship with their own tests.
What you’ll learn:
- Fundamentals of functional programming and Haskell syntax
- Key Haskell concepts: immutability, higher-order functions, lazy evaluation
- Advanced topics: algebraic data types, pattern matching, typeclasses
- Practical applications: file operations, string manipulation
- Monad programming patterns and applicatives.
| Provider | GitHub |
| Instructor | Dmitrii Kovanikov |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 8 hours |
| Exercises | Practical exercises |
| Certificate | None |
Best Concise Course For Beginners (Type Classes)
If you have never programmed in your life, but are curious as to what Haskell and functional programming is all about, Type Classes’s Beginner crash course is for you!
This course is not everything-you-need-to-know about Haskell. Instead, it aims to get you with the basics and a little bit more to get you thinking in Haskell.
Type Classes sells a paid membership for the rest of its catalog, so you’ll see a join prompt at the foot of each page, but the beginner crash course itself is free to read and watch without an account.
No prior experience with programming is required to take this course.
What you’ll learn:
- Haskell basics: functions, types, and GHCi usage
- Writing interactive programs in Haskell
- Fundamental concepts: polymorphism, recursion, higher-order functions
- Introduction to important typeclasses: Monoid, Functor, Monad
- Project organization and practical application of Haskell concepts.
After completing this course, you should take the Validation course, book, or Functortown to learn more about Functor and Monad.
| Website | typeclasses.com |
| Instructors | Chris Martin |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 5–6 hours |
| Certificate | None |
Best University Course With Homework (University of Pennsylvania)
CIS 194 is the course a lot of Haskell programmers point to when someone asks where to start. Brent Yorgey taught it at the University of Pennsylvania and left the entire semester online: twelve weeks of lecture notes plus the homework that goes with them, all free.
The detail that makes it worth your time is the format of the notes. They’re published as literate Haskell (.lhs) as well as HTML, which means you can load a lecture straight into GHCi and evaluate the examples as you read them. The lecture is a runnable program.
The homework is the other half. Eleven assignments come as PDFs with starter files, and several of them build something real rather than drilling syntax: a log file parser, an expression evaluator that targets a small stack VM, a text editor buffer, a parser combinator library, and a game of Risk.
A word on vintage. This is the Spring 2013 edition and nothing has been added since, so there’s no video, and the submission site was for enrolled Penn students, meaning nobody will grade what you write. Haskell’s core has moved slowly enough that the material still holds up, but you’ll occasionally need to reach for current documentation.
You should have programmed in some language before starting.
What you’ll learn:
- Haskell syntax, algebraic data types, and recursion patterns
- Polymorphism, type inference, and type classes
- Higher-order programming and the Prelude
- Lazy evaluation and where it bites
- Folds and monoids
- IO, functors, applicative functors, and monads.
| Institution | University of Pennsylvania |
| Instructor | Brent Yorgey |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 12 weeks of material |
| Exercises | 11 homework assignments with starter files |
| Certificate | None |
Best Hands-On Course With Exercises (Tony Morris)
The aptly named Functional Programming Course will guide you through the basics of functional programming with Haskell.
The free interactive course is structured linearly to assist beginners to Haskell as you’ll learn mainly through reading the course materials and completing the hands-on course exercises.
You should have some programming experience prior to taking this course.
What you’ll learn:
- Haskell syntax and program structure
- Core functional programming concepts: functors, applicatives, monads
- IO operations in a pure functional language
- Advanced topics: states, comonads, parsers
- Practical problem-solving skills through diverse coding exercises.
| Provider | GitHub |
| Instructors | Tony Morris and Mark Hibberd |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | N/A |
| Exercises | Practical exercises with answers |
| Certificate | None |
Best Project-Based Course via Pull Requests (Kowainik)
Learn4Haskell teaches you functional programming in Haskell across just four chapters, and it asks you to complete each one the way you’d ship real work: fork the repository, do the chapter, open a pull request.
That framing is the point of this free course. Rather than reading a tutorial and typing along, you’re editing a real Haskell project with a real build, and each chapter’s exercises come with a test suite that tells you whether you’ve got it right. Working through it leaves you with a git history of your own progress instead of a folder of scratch files.
By the end you should be able to independently create and read basic Haskell code, as well as understand monads and other famous concepts of functional programming.
One thing to know before you start: the authors used to review learner pull requests and give personal feedback, and that has become unreliable. The most recent submissions we checked had been sitting unreviewed for months. The repository itself is still maintained, and the exercises and their tests all work, so treat this as a well-structured self-study project and lean on the test suite rather than counting on a reply.
The course is for people who don’t know Haskell but have some prior programming experience.
What you’ll learn:
- Haskell syntax and fundamental functional programming concepts
- Advanced topics: pattern matching, recursion, polymorphism
- Custom types and typeclasses in Haskell
- Key functional programming concepts: Functor, Applicative, and Monad
- Practical skills through coding exercises with a test suite to check your answers.
| Institution | Kowainik |
| Provider | GitHub |
| Instructors | Veronika Romashkina and Dmitrii Kovanikov |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | N/A |
| Chapters | 4, each completed as a pull request |
| Exercises | Programming exercises with a test suite |
| Certificate | None |
Best Platform for Practicing Haskell Programming (Exercism)
So maybe you’ve taken a course on Haskell from this guide. Now what?
Well, Exercism will tell you what. Exercism is a free online coding platform that provides tons of coding exercises with instant automated feedback for you to practice and learn from.
Not only that, but Exercism also allows you to request personal mentoring for certain exercises for free. That way, an experienced Haskell programmer will look through your code and tell you how to improve on it.
Programmers of all levels of experience can join this platform, as exercises range from easy to challenging.
- Easy exercises include converting a long phrase into an acronym, randomly generating DnD characters, and translating RNA sequences into proteins.
- Medium difficulty exercises consists of computing Pascal’s triangle, implementing a clock that handles times without dates, and transposing text
- The most challenging exercises provided are using lenses to update nested records, resting a zipper for a binary tree, and making a chain of dominoes.
Each exercise comes with automatic analysis of your code as well as an opportunity to request personal mentoring to help you better understand your code’s strengths and flaws.
| Provider | Exercism |
| Level | All |
| Enrollments | 34.7K |
| Exercises | 100+ hands-on programming challenges |
| Mentors | 374 |
| Certificate | None |
How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
I built this guide following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:
- Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 250K online courses and 250K reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of Haskell courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
- Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
- Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and fit in a set of criteria: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.
Fabio and Pat revised later versions of this article.
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