Re: [Caml-list] OCaml popularity

[William Lovas <wlovas@stwing.upenn.edu>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 05:12:43PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2003 at 08:02:30AM +1300, Graham Guttocks wrote:
> > Do you mean that such a book could not be written, or simply that it
> > just has not been written yet?  I personally would like to see an
> > ``Objective Caml for dummies'' as the available introductory material
> > (in English) is pretty poor IMO.
> 
> Someone else actually said it well on this list a while back. There
> is no "Programming Perl"-equivalent for OCaml.

What about the O'Reilly book, "Developing Applications With Objective
Caml"?  It's not perfect yet, but the preliminary translation from the
French is available at:

    http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/html/index.html

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

> And please don't start by telling me about the lambda calculus or
> higher-order functions.

The O'Reilly book starts in Chapter 2 with the basics of functional
programming.  This makes sense because that's really what sets O'Caml
apart from other more mainstream languages.

> Start by telling me how to read and write files.

Chapter 3 goes into the imperative aspects, including I/O.

> How to draw a nice picture

Chapter 5: The Graphics Interface.

> Go on to tell me how to access my SQL database from an
> OCaml application server.

Not quite -- but Chapter 6 has several example applications, including one
that models a simple database.

The rest of the book has a very practical feel to it, constantly grounding
itself in real-world examples and applications.


Like i said, it's not quite ideal at this point, but i'm surprised nobody's
mentioned it yet.  Would it help O'Caml's cause, do you think, if O'Reilly
were to polish this up and publish it?

cheers,
William

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