In truth, you don't actually have to climb the IO monad learning curve. IO in Haskell has nothing to do with monads.[1] It's simply a type which encodes input and output effects. Simple and elegant. The fact that people so thoroughly confuse the issue by mixing the disparate topics of IO and monads, is a shame.

[1] http://blog.jle.im/entry/io-monad-considered-harmful