References
<<
>>
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monads_in_functional_programming as the primary source of references.

In Haskell, u is called return, and m is called combinator, or 'join'.

Haskell books mention List as an example of a monad, and have a rather special interpretation of State Machine Monad.

Another example of a monad is Google's map/reduce.

This course translated into Russian, on habra