Differences between OCaml 2 and 3

Question

Hello, I'm interested in learning this language, but it seems that there is very few tutorials and books on the subject.

I've found only one suitable book on the subject (Developing Applications With Objective Caml) which would be absolutely perfect but the problem is that it is based on version 2.04.

So my only concern is if there would not be any serious problems with using this book, for OCaml 3.x. Or if there are any good tutorials concerning OCaml online please let me know.

Thank you

Answer 1

There's a changelog here. There's been quite a few changes, but they are mostly the addition of new features or new standard library functions, and there are almost no breaking changes. So you could use the book and try everything on a 3.x compiler.

You could also try this online tutorial.

Answer 2

You can definitely learn by this book. Although many new things were introduced in ocaml 3.x I don't think that you will run into these as a beginner.

Get used to the language's concepts. Later on you can checkout the new features.

See http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/release.en.html for further information.

Answer 3

Just for the reference, there are a bunch of books available for OCaml:

1. OCaml for Scientists
2. Practical OCaml
3. Introduction to OCaml - free draft