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Date: | 2009-03-31 (13:37) |
From: | Kuba Ober <ober.14@o...> |
Subject: | Re: [Caml-list] questions |
> > the following are the most visible ocaml tutorials, but are low > quality, blog like, full of misleading characterizations, > irrevelancies, misleading comparisons. The type that you'd spend > hours on and got more confused, regardless whether you are a expert > logician or expert industrial programer. These tutorial's quality > and nature are similar to the ones you'd find of the freely bundled > official tutorials from perl, java, or even haskell. Typically > written as a revised diary of learning experiences by student > programers, or by academicians who are llliterate in technical > writing. > > • intro to ocaml, from official site > http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual003.html > > • “Objective CAML Tutorial”, most cited tutorial on the web > http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/ > > There are 3 or so more ocaml tutorials i've looked on the web, from > the first page of google search with word “ocaml tutorial”. I don't > think they are not worth your time. > > ------------------------- > > I'd be good if the ocaml managers perhaps thru some arrangement, to > borrow Jon Harrop's chapter 1, or other quality sources, in > replacement of the tutorial on the official site. Because, a quailty > tutorial bundled with the official release has great impact. The > official tutorial makes the first impression of the lang for most > people. > > Xah There must be some reason why the manual and other materials on the official site are of such poor quality. I've thought a bit about it, and the only reason I see is that the authors do not have a feel for what it takes to learn/understand/use that language. They obviously know it all through, but that's still far removed from being able to explain it to someone else. I don't know, of course, how it is that one understands something "well" yet is not able to explain it to somebody else. To me, that's very fragile knowledge. I always thought that deep understanding implies an ability to extract what's important, and to lead the other person from some "basics" (whatever they may be) to the conclusion. Some experience in imperative languages can be perhaps expected of the OCaml beginners. But the manual, the official tutorial, and even ocaml-tutorial, fall short of being really useful - for me. Personally, I found them next to useless, but that perhaps has to do with my own shortcomings. Books that lag behind the current release's features are not all that great either -- you find a book that's a good match to your needs, and then, after a while, find that you miss on a lot of good stuff that's not mentioned in the book. I have two examples of such books: Jon's book, and Marcelo DiPierro's web2py book. Both are very good books because the authors have a feel for what it takes to understand what they talk about. Yet both miss out on some newer features of OCaml and web2py, respectively -- features that would be best explained by the very same authors! Cheers, Kuba