Real World OCaml: Functional Programming for the Masses

by Anil Madhavapeddy, Yaron Minsky

This fast-moving tutorial introduces you to OCaml, an industrial-strength programming language designed for expressiveness, safety, and speed. Through the book's many examples, you'll quickly learn how OCaml stands out as a tool for writing fast, succinct, and readable systems code using functional programming. Real World OCaml takes you through the concepts of the language at a brisk pace, and then helps you explore the tools and techniques that make OCaml an effective and practical tool. You'll also delve deep into the details of the compiler toolchain and OCaml's simple and efficient runtime system. This second edition brings the book up to date with almost a decade of improvements in the OCaml language and ecosystem, with new chapters covering testing, GADTs, and platform tooling. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core, thanks to the support of Tarides. Their generous contribution will bring more people to OCaml.

Genres: Programming

Kindle Edition

Published October 13, 2022

Reviews

[Bozhidar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best OCaml book that currently exists (not that there's much competition in general), and certainly the newest (as of Dec 2022). While I loved it overall (especially the deep coverage of the runtime and the broader OCaml platform), I'm deducting one star due to the heavy emphasis on using Jane Street's libraries (e.g. Base). I understand the reasoning behind this, but I would have preferred it if most of the code was using the standard library (when feasible) with Base mentioned here and there as an alternative.

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first book into the world of OCaml, and I guess I was lucky enough to read the second edition published just recently, so things in this book are fairly relevant and comprehensive, compared to other books on OCaml.

With experience in other languages, like C/C++ and Python, and some basic knowledge in PLT (programming language theory) and FP (functional programming), I found this book organized in a logical way and relatively easy to read. But sometimes I still struggled to follow and had to read over and google, since OCaml is quite a different language from popular ones.

Overall, I think this book is worth reading and could get you started with OCaml. I read the free online version, in which I did notice a few minor typos and code examples that didn't run on OCaml 5.0. Yet such defects should not obscure the good. It's a great book.