[Caml-list] ANN: Real World OCaml beta1 available

[Caml-list] ANN: Real World OCaml beta1 available

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

Yaron Minsky, Jason Hickey and I are pleased to announce the beta release of
our forthcoming O'Reilly book, called "Real World OCaml", available online at
http://realworldocaml.org

The book is split into three parts: language concepts, tools and techniques,
and understanding the runtime.  As promised last year, we are making a public
beta available for community review and to help us hunt down inaccuracies and
find areas that need more clarification.

We've had the book in closed alpha for six months or so and have developed a
feedback system that uses Github to record your comments. This lets us follow
up to each review with clarifications and keep track of our progress in fixing
issues.  During alpha, we've received over 1400 comments in this fashion (and
addressed the vast majority of them!).  However, since we anticipate more
comments coming in from a public beta, we would request that you read the FAQ
to avoid drowning us in repeat comments: http://www.realworldocaml.org/#faq

(TL;DR followup another comment on Github directly if you can instead of
creating a new issue via the web interface)

This release is available in HTML format online at:
   http://www.realworldocaml.org

O'Reilly is currently preparing a Rough Cuts release that will make the beta
available as PDF and in popular eBook formats.   We anticipate that this will
be available later this week, and I'll send a followup when that happens.

Finally, we would especially like to thank our alpha reviewers.  Their feedback
(https://github.com/ocamllabs/rwo-comments/issues) has been invaluable to the
beta release. The book also includes substantial contributions to individual
chapters from Jeremy Yallop (FFI), Stephen Weeks (GC) and Leo White (objects).

If you have any comments that you'd like to send directly by e-mail, please
contact us at rwo-authors@recoil.org.

Release notes for beta1:

* The first-class modules chapter is incomplete, pending some portability
  improvements to the ocaml-plugins Core library.
* The binary serialization chapter is also incomplete, but has just enough
  to teach you about the Async RPC library.
* The installation chapter will be revised in anticipation of the OCaml 4.1
  release, and is currently quite source-based.
* The packaging and build systems chapter hasn't been started yet.  We're
  still deciding whether or not to make this an online pointer rather than
  a print chapter, since it's likely to change quite fast.
* We are preparing exercises per chapter that are not included in this
  particular beta release, but will be available online as soon as possible.
* The code examples will all be clonable as a separate repository in beta2.

best,
Yaron, Jason and Anil