> Someone else actually said it well on this list a while back. There
> is no "Programming Perl"-equivalent for OCaml.

Books have both the advantage and disadvantage to end in a (more or 
less) well structured exposition of whole topic.

Very often what is needed is a way to figure out how you can do this or 
that in the language along with relevant pointers in the documentation 
graph. This is why I think that a bunch of well edited online tutorials 
would do a better job; assuming that the reader has a minimal knowledge 
of the language, something like the first two chapter of the ocaml 
reference manual with a little more details.

Besides, tutorials can show good programming style, features of the 
language, how to set up things (e.g. make a new toplevel), give 
background for newbies (e.g. Pcre is a good alternative to Str), etc. I 
guess the top level would make that kind of tutorials very enjoyable, 
both to write and read.

 From simple things --- not too long --- to more complex ones with a 
very well defined and pleasing goal.

 > Using the socket interface. Show how to build your dummy little 
server.
 > Using regular expressions (pcre) and i/o. Show how to install the lib 
and implement a grep.
 > Accessing a database.
 > Using the thread library.
...

And well,
 > Show how to write a lambda calculus interpreter.

Just little things to help you start playing.

Daniel

P.S. See for example the tutorials available on www.oreilly.com (e.g. 
the ones on cocoa / objective-c programming). Of course it's about book 
promotion there, but some tutorial are not bad.

-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners