[ocaml-biz] Book

[Martin Jambon]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Brian Hurt wrote:

> My theory is that the right introductory book hasn't been written yet.
> Larry Wall may have created Perl, but Randall Schwartz made it popular.
> Said book should leverage the programming knowledge people already have-
> but it should focus on the pragmatic.  Terms and concepts shouldn't be
> introduced until they can be demonstrated, and demonstrated to be usefull.
> And it should be chock full of examples.  Working code to inspect, to the
> extent possible solving real problems.  Stuff the reader might look at and
> say "yeah- I could see myself implementing that".  And the book should
> take care to explain concepts which aren't common place in most popular
> languages- a classic example is recursion as looping.  Which I happened to
> already know before stumbling onto Ocaml, but a lot of people don't.

Such a book exists in French: "Le langage Caml", by Weis and Leroy.
http://caml.inria.fr/books-eng.html#camlprimer

I personally think it is an excellent and exceptional book.
It simply teaches programming and requires almost nothing from the reader.
The examples are written in Caml Light, but could be easily translated
into Objective Caml and English.
The first part of the book is about programming in general in Caml,
and the second part is a collection of programming problems which
illustrate "how to program in such a situation" rather than "which library
I should use for doing this or that".
Reading this book does not require a computer (at least for the first
part).


> I'm taking a swing at writting this book.  I don't have anything I'm ready
> to show off yet, which is why I haven't been making any grand
> announcements.  I just wanted to say that I am, in fact, actually trying
> to do something towards making Ocaml more popular.

Well, then have you read "Le langage Caml"?
(unfortunately I have left France without this book, so I can't translate
anything for you right now)

In addition to this book, the reference manual of Caml Light was published
in parallel as a regular book.

Maybe you could ask the authors about what they think of an
adaptation for the Objective Caml and English languages.


Martin