Completely agreed. The only way to learn about monads is to (a) see them being used in examples and (b) use them yourself — exactly like every other concept in programming. Just seeing an abstract explanation is not nearly enough.
Worked on a Haskell team as a test engineer for 14 months and struggled like hell to understand monads (one of the researchers there came up with using the damn things, but I couldn’t understand it for the life of me). Wasn’t until I stopped looking at it through their academic lenses and had to simply deal with the repetitive errors of several chained functions that I understood it.
