Virtually all the tutorials on Monads introduce them only after a lengthy discussion about Functors, and often resorting to intrepid and debatable metaphors.
I dare to take a different path and to go straight to the point, following what Mike Vanier did in his seminal 8-post series Yet Another Monad Tutorial.

I challenged myself to write a post that:

• prioritizes code over storytelling
• uses no metaphors (no boxes, no burritos)
• does not require Category Theory
• jumps past the discussion why Functional Programming is valuable
• does not follow the classical Functors -> Monads narrative
• is tailored for C# developers and digestible by Java ones

  Table of chapters

• Chapter 1: in which you realize that Monads are not things
• Chapter 2: in which you sense that it’s all about function composition
• Chapter 3: in which you reimplement — and finally understand! — C#’s function application
• Chapter 4: in which you liberate C# from IO side effects
• Chapter 5: in which you make C# nondeterministic
• Chapter 6: in which you kill null
• Chapter 7: in which you discover that Bind is a combinator and you feel illuminated
• Chapter 8: in which you achieve true enlightenment seeing that Functors are not boxes
• Chapter 9: In which you see how easy functors are, and you find inner peace

References

Mike Vanier - Yet Another Monad Tutorial

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