[ocaml-biz] Book

[Brian Hurt]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, William D. Neumann wrote:

> On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Martin Jambon wrote:
> 
> >>  as well as rewriting sections that delve a
> >> bit too deeply into the academic side of things.
> >
> > But unfortunately normal people are not prepared for an "OCaml Cookbook".
> > They have to learn a few things first (I call this academic).
> 
> Well, by academic, I'm referring to things like bringing in concepts of 
> functional programming that don't need to be brought up (or at least named 
> at an early point) to learn how to program in OCaml -- things like lambda 
> calculus, referential transparency, operational semantics, etc.  Look at 
> Cousineau & Mauny and then look at Hickey's work -- see a striking 
> difference?  A person who already knows how to program in something like C 
> or Java can breeze right through the Hickey's book and learn a great deal 
> about basic programming in OCaml, possibly stopping for a bit to digest 
> the section on red/black trees.

I think I have Cousineau & Mauny's book.  Going back and re-reading it, 
after I already knew Ocaml, I could generally understand things.  It 
didn't really help me learning Ocaml the first time.

> What I (and I believe Brian) think is needed is a book that helps people 
> migrate from other, better known, languages to OCaml.  A book like 
> "Learning Perl", or Paul Wang's "C++ With Object-Oriented Programming". 
> This is opposed to a "This is how to program" type book, or even worse, a 
> "Structure And Interpretation of Computer Programs" book using OCaml as 
> the main language.  That can come along *after* a migratory book.

Precisely.

I will comment- dead tree versions are extremely important.  Especially 
dead tree versions of books you can pick up at a decent bookstore.  Which 
is one reason why I'm not showing off my work at the moment.  I personally 
would prefer a dual distribution- dead tree + electronic.  I think the 
example of the Baen free library shows this sells the most books.  But 
given a choice, I'll pick the dead tree distribution over the electronic 
version.  So I don't want to tie my future publisher's hands over the 
issue by having electronic copies out there wandering around.

-- 
"Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive,
difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of
mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian