In the process of learning haskell, I've been trying to become comfortable with the function applicator ($) and function composition (.). Here is some code to show how they relate (and how they relate to using parenthesis to enforce order of operations):
let dict = [(1,'a'),(2,'b'),(3,'c')]
-- The following 3 lines of code are equivalent...
snd . head . filter (\item@(k,v) -> k == 2) $ dict -- returns 'b'
snd $ head $ filter (\item@(k,v) -> k == 2) dict -- returns 'b'
snd (head (filter (\item@(k,v) -> k == 2) dict)) -- return 'b'