I have also learned ocaml with "Le Langage Caml" and I really enjoyed this
book (it was one of the first book on language programming that I rode).
It might a be a good idea to update the content of this book and to
translate it into ocaml/english :-)

Thomas

2009/3/31 Martin Jambon <martin.jambon@ens-lyon.org>

> Kuba Ober wrote:
> > There must be some reason why the manual and other materials on the
> > official site are of such poor quality. I've thought a bit about it, and
> > the only reason I see is that the authors do not have a feel for what it
> > takes to learn/understand/use that language. They obviously know it all
> > through, but that's still far removed from being able to explain it to
> > someone else. I don't know, of course, how it is that one understands
> > something "well" yet is not able to explain it to somebody else. To me,
> > that's very fragile knowledge. I always thought that deep understanding
> > implies an ability to extract what's important, and to lead the other
> > person from some "basics" (whatever they may be) to the conclusion.
>
> I can see one reason: like many other French OCaml programmers, I learned
> OCaml at school (it was in 1998). French teachers don't rely heavily on a
> book. There is however one book that covers the essentials, "Le Langage
> Caml"
> by Weis and Leroy, which despite using the Caml Light dialect is the most
> enlightening programming book I've ever got to read. For the rest, there is
> the reference manual of OCaml and plenty of source code all around the web.
>
> I think that's why there is not much more incentive to write a complete
> "replace-the-teacher" text book on OCaml written by the core OCaml
> developers,
> who are mostly a French team. Besides, it's a lot of work and doesn't make
> money.
>
> Of course there are now a few great books and tutorials on OCaml in
> English,
> none of them having an official status.
>
>
> Martin
>
> --
> http://mjambon.com/
>
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