Excerpts from the Preface:

Objective Caml (OCaml) is a popular, expressive, high-performance dialect of ML developed by a research team at INRIA in France. This book presents a practical introduction and guide to the language, with topics ranging from how to write a program to the concepts and conventions that affect how affect how programs are developed in OCaml. The text can be divided into three main parts.

- The core language (Chapters 2–10).
- The module system (Chapters 11–13).
- Objects and class (Chapters 14–17).

This sequence is intended to follow the ordering of concepts needed as programs grow in size (though objects and classes can be introduced at any point in the development). It also happens to follow the history of Caml: many of the core concepts were present in Caml and Caml Light in the mid-1980s and early 1990s; Caml Special Light introduced modules in 1995; and Objective Caml added objects and classes in 1996.

Intended Audience:

This book is intended for programmers, undergraduate and beginning graduate students with some experience programming in a procedural programming language like C or Java, or in some other functional programming language. Some knowledge of basic data structures like lists, stacks, and trees is assumed as well.

The exercises vary in difficulty. They are intended to provide practice, as well as to investigate language concepts in greater detail, and occasionally to introduce special topics not present elsewhere in the text.