> Reading and writing to/from files and network sockets, etc works pretty much the same as you're used to from imperative programming languages.

I agree completely that it's not necessary (and maybe even detrimental) to learn monads to use Haskell's IO, but I think this claim is dubious. Not too many imperative languages have lazy IO and this feature can be a surprising hurdle for the Haskell beginner who is versed in other languages.