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> In addition, I would advise against reading other books, as they tend to be incorrect and/or in French. [emphasis mine] Hey now, "Le Langage Caml" might be i
by groovy2shoes 12y ago
> In addition, I would advise against reading other books, as they tend to be incorrect and/or in French. [emphasis mine]
Hey now, "Le Langage Caml" might be in French, and it might be pretty dated at this point, but it's a solid introduction to functional programming and Caml (note the lack of "O" -- like I said, it's pretty dated).
One of the things I like about it is that it it has 5 chapters dedicated to walking through some pretty complicated examples (following 11 chapters giving a tutorial introduction to Caml). With many programming books the examples are so simple that it's hard to see how they all fit together, but Weis and Leroy do an outstanding job of showing how interesting programs would be written in Caml: an interpreter for a little logic language, a file compression/decompression utility, an emulator and assembler for a RISC processor, a "mini-Pascal" compiler targeting said processor, and a regular expression search utility (à la grep). It doesn't just show the code for these programs, but it walks you through building it, from design(!) all the way to the finished product, explaining every little bit in detail. I wish more programming books did this kind of thing!
Like "Real World OCaml", it covers a bit of the runtime -- it's the Caml Light runtime rather than the OCaml runtime, but some of the discussion applies equally to OCaml as well.
Lastly, it has a style that I feel is lacking in many programming books: the authors are careful to use rather precise phrasing. I think this is good because it helps to eliminate a lot of ambiguous or misleading text.
So sure, advise against it for people who don't understand French. For people who do understand French (even a little -- it's mostly technical terms), "Le Langage Caml" is an excellent book.
- omaranto 12y agoThat line also caught my eye. It sounds insane: isn't it much more reasonable to recomend books based on their quality rather than the language they are written in? I agree with you that "Le Langage Caml" is a pretty good book, but I disagree with what you say at the end about advising people who don't read French against reading it. I would instead just advise everyone interested in Ocaml to read it and people who can't read French will automatically ignore my advice without me needing to say anything about it!
- e12e 12y agoThanks for this recommendation -- I could use a book to brush up on my French on (and caml :). I'd love to hear some other "best-of" programming book (originally) in French? My native language is Norwegian, and I'm afraid I've not read a whole lot in Norwegian that I feel I could recommend (mostly because a lot of the most obvious interesting candidates like Simula and MVC is written in English anyway). Besides, I'm afraid the set of people that don't already speak/understand Norwegian, and would like to learn it in order to be literate in programming/technical jargon/style is rather small...? I also speak Japanese, but I can't really claim to be literate -- I'd be happy to receive some best-of recommendations there too -- the only way to become technically literate is to read, after all :-)
- omaranto 12y agoI really like Christian Queinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces. I read the English translation but the original is in French, Principes d'implantation de Scheme et Lisp (that's actually the title of a revised edition, the first edition was called Les Langages Lisp).
- andrewflnr 12y agoThe point of an article like this is to warn people about things like tht in advance, not make them find out themselves. For that reason, at least, it's silly to tell your readers to read a book you know very well most of them are incapable of reading; that's a waste of their time.
- groovy2shoes 12y agoWhy would someone who doesn't understand French waste their time trying to read a book called "Le Langage Caml"?