I found that once you know your way around the basics (which the FTP mentioned here is a big part of), it becomes quite trivial to just "hack away". I am now 4 years aboard the Haskell train and use Haskell for scripting work I would have used bash or Python before. That said I have about 10 years of practical Java experience under my belt and Haskell was refreshingly different. But before this thread get's out of hand I'll keep my fanboy mouth shut ;)