Richard Bird takes a radically new approach to algorithm design, namely, design by calculation. These 30 short chapters each deal with a particular programming problem drawn from sources as diverse as games and puzzles, intriguing combinatorial tasks, and more familiar areas such as data compression and string matching. Each pearl starts with the statement of the problem expressed using the functional programming language Haskell, a powerful yet succinct language for capturing algorithmic ideas clearly and simply. The novel aspect of the book is that each solution is calculated from an initial formulation of the problem in Haskell by appealing to the laws of functional programming.

Richard Bird采用了一种全新的算法设计方法，即通过计算进行设计。这30个简短的章节分别涉及一个特定的编程问题，这些问题的来源多种多样，如游戏和谜题、有趣的组合任务以及更熟悉的领域，如数据压缩和字符串匹配。每一颗珍珠都从使用函数式编程语言Haskell表达的问题的陈述开始，Haskell是一种强大而简洁的语言，用于清晰而简单地捕捉算法思想。这本书的新颖之处在于，每个解决方案都是根据Haskell中问题的初始公式，借助函数编程的法则计算出来的。