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It's one of the worst books I've ever read.
Haskell popularity has been exploding in the past few years, with tons of new libraries and books. I guess the other thing that misled me is the fact that OCaml has one implementation and SML has several. I'm sad to say, I completely agree. The basic syntax issues are glossed over. About this book Objective Caml OCaml is an open source programming language that allows you to utilize both functional and object-oriented programming. The reason why Haskell programmers eventually end up caring a great deal about the M-word, in the same way they end up caring about the Applicative , Functor and Monoid classes, is that there are very good software components that can be defined using only the services of these classes. Haskell is a really fun and mind-blowing language, and it will teach you a lot , but I haven't found it to be a practical language.
What went wrong with such a great idea? It's obvious that Seibel's book has been a major influence for Practical OCaml.
Not only is the structure similar; several of the practical chapters cover the same topics, which is a great idea it's quite interesting to compare a Common Lisp version of a Baeysian filter with an OCaml version. However, the similarities end there. The first thing that turns me off is the writing style.
Mildly put, it's disastrous. The text doesn't flow and there are terrible leaps in logic. Even more distracting are the many irrelevant concepts confusingly blended with the text. To make matters worse, the initial chapters intended to introduce the core language are particularly badly structured. I don't know OCaml good enough to comment on the quality of the code itself, but even so I found several obvious errors and bugs in it. And it gets worse. Many code samples use constructs that haven't been introduced yet.
When they do get introduced, the explanations range from weak to downright insulting. For example, early in the book the author mentions monads without any further explanation. The index has one entry for monads, page A monad is purely functional, is difficult to fully understand, and is way, way beyond the scope of this discussion and this book.
Practical OCaml 1st ed. Joshua B. Smith is a consultant specializing in data problems and computing infrastructure. He got into computers while an undergraduate at Denison University in Ohio and spends most of his programming time using Python, OCaml, and Java. Objective Caml (OCaml) is an open source programming language that allows you to utilize both functional and object-oriented programming. Sporting features .
Language aficionados will be sure to enjoy the occasional digression into tangential topics such as OCaml's impurities from the functional programming perspective, with thoughts about how to overcome them using mutability, references, and classes. In later chapters, you'll put what you've learned to work, building applications capable of performing complex log-file processing, crawling the Web, filtering spam, and even broadcasting audio over a network using the Shoutcast protocol.
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About the Author p. Inheritance p. All Rights Reserved.
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