6 Excellent Free Books to Learn OCaml

Last Updated on June 28, 2024

4. Using, Understanding, and Unraveling The OCaml Language by Didier Rémy

Using, Understanding, and Unraveling The OCaml Language is a multi-dimensional presentation of the OCaml language that combines an informal and intuitive approach to the language with a rigorous definition and a formal semantics of a large subset of the language, including ML.

Throughout this book, the specific concepts and techniques are given rigorous theoretical justification. A sample of programming exercises with different levels of difficulty are included.

Chapters cover:

• Core ML – with examples, formalize a very small subset of the language, and shows how to derive other constructs remaining in core ML whenever possible.
• The core of OCaml – including type abbreviations, record types, mutable storage and side effects, and exceptions.
• The object layer – starts with an introduction to objects and classes, then presents the core of the object layer, and ends with a few advanced uses of objects.
• The module language – explores OCaml’s powerful module system.
• Mixing modules and objects – discusses the overlapping of features and the specificities, and show how to use them in harmony.

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5. The OCaml system release 4.08 by Xavier Leroy, Damien Doligez, Alain Frisch, Jacques Garrigue, Didier Rémy and Jérôme Vouillon

The OCaml system release is the official User’s Manual. It serves as a complete reference guide to OCaml.

Updated for each version of OCaml, it contains the description of the language, of its extensions, and the documentation of the tools and libraries included in the official distribution.

The book covers:

• An introduction to OCaml – gives an overview of the language.
• The OCaml language – the reference description of the language.
• The OCaml tools – documents the compilers, top level system, and programming utilities.
• The OCaml library – describes the modules provided in the standard library.

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6. Developing Applications With OCaml by Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury and Bruno Pagano

Developing Applications With OCaml is divided into four main sections that build upon each other.

Each section has a set of chapters that present some related concepts, followed by an “Applications” chapter that uses those concepts to create a few small applications such as a minesweeper game, a graphical interface library, a couple of different two-player games, a distributed robot simulation, and a basic HTTP servlet.

The book explores:

• Language Core – complete presentation of the basic elements of the Objective Caml language looking into the functional core of the languages, a comparison between the “pure” functional and imperative styles, and the graphics library. This section then exhibits three applications: management of a simple database, a mini-Basic interpreter and a well-known single-player game, minesweeper.
• Development Tools – describes the various tools for application development including compilation modes, main libraries, garbage collection mechanism, the use of tools for debugging and profiling programs. Later chapters address lexical and syntactic tools, how to interface Objective Caml programs with C, constructing a library and an application.
• Application Structure – describes the two parts of organizing a program: with modules, and with objects.
• Concurrency and Distribution – introduces concurrent and distributed programs while detailing communication between processes, lightweight or not, and on the internet.

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Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Real World OCaml and more books
Page 2 – Using, Understanding, and Unraveling The OCaml Language and more books

All books in this series: