Re: [Caml-list] Re: A labltk book?

[Matt Gushee <matt@gushee.net>]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Monday 15 October 2007 17:42:39 Jeff Shaw wrote:
>> This thread was quite derailed... should I then assume there's very
>> little interest in such a book?
> 
> I think there would be far more interest in an introductory book on OCaml 
> published as cheaply as possible through someone like O'Reilly, that includes 
> a chapter on GUI programming. Or a IDE that makes it as easy as possible to 
> get started with OCaml that might be written using Tk.

Could be ... some time ago (2 years, maybe?) I proposed the idea of (me) 
writing a book on LablTk; there was very little response, favorable or 
otherwise, but at least one person thought it would be nice to have a 
book on GUI programming in OCaml, perhaps including LablTk but with 
greater emphasis on LablGTK. Even if I had agreed with the idea, at that 
time I had little experience with (Labl)GTK. But I don't agree with the 
idea: you could write a book about GUI *design*, but that should be 
neither toolkit-specific nor language-specific. On the other hand, a 
book about GUI programming techniques in a specific language will 
probably appeal mainly to people with specific projects in mind, which 
implies that they probably want to learn one good GUI toolkit ... which 
in the case of OCaml would have to be LablGTK.

I realize Tk is progressing and making some much-wanted improvements, 
but to me it seems like too little, too late.

As for Jon's idea, sure, great! But I wonder if any major publisher 
would take it on. After all, O'Reilly *has* an introductory OCaml book; 
it would need to be updated and translated, but that's still much easier 
than creating a new one. Yet they don't seem interested in doing that. 
So some brave soul might have to self-publish something.

-- 
Matt Gushee
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