Learn You a Haskell for Great Good is a fantastic introduction to Haskell in particular and functional programming in general. Definitely a great place to start:
I'm curious about what happens when a geographical location changes country. If Catalunya gains independence from Spain, will the MapCode associated with my house here in Barcelona change? Will the old "Spanish" MapCode still be valid?
Speaking of current events, do Isreal and Palestine have separate MapCodes and what happens when borders shift?
Partly it's what I'm used to, but I've yet to find anything "easier" for the large amount of mathematics I typeset. There is a lot of notation and very little graphics or difficult formatting.
At the moment I'm a little hesitant to make it public. Partly because there's a large chunk of unpublished research in there, but also because some of the early drafts are a little embarrassing.
Perhaps when the thesis is deposited (and hence public) I could add that in for "historical" interest.
My (unsolicited) advice would be, go and find one of those jobs that you idealise from a few decades ago. They still exist, just where they always were, in academia. Of course, it's not all playing, but if you want your job to revolve around programming things that nobody has programmed before, that's the place to be.
Have a look at getting into a PhD programme in Computer Science, Computational Engineering or something even more abstract like Computation Number Theory.