I am finding that Monads are one of those things where they are just not going to make sense until you have written a bunch of code with them. (And I think once you get to that point you will wonder how you ever lived without them.

Yeah, that's my impression. (Much like most of functional programming. Having gotten used to lambdas and closures, languages without them drive me *crazy* nowadays.)

I get the Maybe Monad and the Container Monad. The State Monad and a few others leave my head spinning.

Maybe I find totally obvious; Container and State I *kind* of get, but not quite. More generally, I don't quite grok the abstraction of Monads yet; that's what I'm trying to get to.

If you would be interested in being a tech reviewer I can probably get you a some free e-books.

In principle, yes, but I'm sufficiently over-stretched right now that I shouldn't volunteer -- too high a likelihood of dropping the ball...