I read the book a while back and it is absolutely fantastic. What I understand about monads, I learnt it from this book (no other exposition of monads ever made sense to me), and I particularly like his progression functors -> applicative functors -> monads. I think it's the clearest way to proceed (certainly helped me a lot anyways)
You can do Applicative -> Alternative and study Alternatives as Monoids of Applicatives and then lay on the difference between (<*>) and (<>) as producing a seminearring!
And then go study Monads because why not. They're kind of cool, too.
