[Haskell-cafe] Re: Best book/tutorial on category theory and its applications

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:41:50 -0700 (PDT), fero
<frantisek.kocun at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>Hi, 
>I would like to buy some booke on category theory and its applications. Can
>you recommend me the best?

Recently, I had to study some category theory in order to prepare for
a local category theory study group meeting, and after some
comparison, settled on the following relatively short set (128 pp.) of
notes, condensed from a much thicker book (303 pp.) on category
theory:

Category Theory Lecture Notes for ESSLLI
Michael Barr, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill
University
Charles Wells, Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve
University
http://www.math.upatras.gr/~cdrossos/Docs/B-W-LectureNotes.pdf

The above-mentioned lecture notes were condensed from the following
book, and then rearranged to present category theory from a computer
science perspective:

Toposes, Triples and Theories
by Michael Barr and Charles Wells
http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/math/wells/pub/ttt.html

According to the above-referenced home page for this book:

> The original book, Grundlehren der math. Wissenschaften 278. Springer-Verlag, 1983, is now out of print. A revised and corrected version is now available free for downloading.

An even shorter book on category theory is the following:

A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory - the calculational approach
by Maarten M Fokkinga
http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~fokkinga/mmf92b.html

However, I did not prefer the above book, despite its brevity, because
unlike the other two titles, it did not including any specific
material on monads.

>What do you think about "Categories and Computer Science (Cambridge Computer
>Science Texts)" at
>http://www.amazon.com/Categories-Computer-Science-Cambridge-Texts/dp/0521422264/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product
>?

I haven't read it, so I would need to review it before giving an
opinion.  I shall keep it in mind, however; thank you for the
reference.

-- Benjamin L. Russell