About This Book

Reporting Errors. If you find an error, please report it! Or if you have a suggestion about how to rewrite some part of the book, let us know. Just go to the page of the book for which you’d like to make a suggestion, click on the GitHub icon (it looks like a cat) near the top right of the page, and click “open issue” or “suggest edit”. The latter is a little heavier weight, because it requires you to fork the textbook repository with GitHub. But for minor edits that will be appreciated and lead to much quicker uptake of suggestions.

Background. This book is used at Cornell for a third-semester programming course. Most students have had one semester of introductory programming in Python, followed by one semester of object-oriented programming in Java. Frequent comparisons are therefore made to those two languages. Readers who have studied similar languages should have no difficulty following along. The book does not assume any prior knowledge of functional programming, but it does assume that readers have prior experience programming in some mainstream imperative language. Knowledge of discrete mathematics at the level of a standard first-semester CS course is also assumed.

Videos. You will find over 200 YouTube videos embedded throughout this book. The videos usually provide an introduction to material, upon which the textbook then expands. These videos were produced during pandemic when the Cornell course that uses this textbook, CS 3110, had to be asynchronous. The student response to them was overwhelmingly positive, so they are now being made public as part of the textbook. But just so you know, they were not produced by a professional A/V team—just a guy in his basement who was learning as he went.

The videos mostly use the versions of OCaml and its ecosystem that were current in Fall 2020. Current versions you are using are likely to look different from the videos, but don’t be alarmed: the underlying ideas are the same. The most visible difference is likely to be the VS Code plugin for OCaml. In Fall 2020 the badly-aging “OCaml and Reason IDE” plugin was still being used. It has since been superseded by the “OCaml Platform” plugin.

The textbook and videos sometimes cover topics in different orders. The videos are placed in the textbook nearest to the topic they cover. To watch the videos in their original order, start with this YouTube playlist.

Collaborative Annotations. At the right margin of each page, you will find an annotation feature provided by hypothes.is. You can use this to highlight and make private notes as you study the text. You can form study groups to share your annotations, or share them publicly. Check out these tips for how to annotate effectively.

Executable Code. Many pages of this book have OCaml code embedded in them. The output of that code is already shown in the book. Here’s an example:

print_endline "Hello world!"

Hello world!

- : unit = ()

You can also edit and re-run the code yourself to experiment and check your understanding. Look for the icon near the top right of the page that looks like a rocket ship. In the drop-down menu you’ll find two ways to interact with the code:

• Binder will launch the site mybinder.org, which is a free cloud-based service for “reproducible, interactive, shareable environments for science at scale.” All the computation happens in their cloud servers, but the UI is provided through your browser. It will take a little while for the textbook page to open in Binder. Once it does, you can edit and run the code in a Jupyter notebook. Jupyter notebooks are documents (usually ending in the .ipynb extension) that can be viewed in web browsers and used to write narrative content as well as code. They became popular in data science communities (especially Python, R, and Julia) as a way of sharing analyses. Now many languages can run in Jupyter notebooks, including OCaml. Code and text are written in cells in a Jupyter notebook. Look at the “Cell” menu in it for commands to run cells. Note that Shift-Enter is usually a hotkey for running the cell that has focus.

• Live Code will actually do about the same thing, except that instead of leaving the current textbook page and taking you off to Binder, it will modify the code cells on the page to be editable. It takes some time for the connection to be made behind the scenes, during which you will see “Waiting for kernel”. After the connection has been made, you can edit all the code cells on the page and re-run them. If the connection fails, then first launch the Binder site; this can take a long time. After it succeeds and loads the textbook page as a Jupyter notebook, you can close Binder, reload the textbook page, and launch Live Code again. It should now be successful at connecting relatively quickly.

Try interacting with the cell above now to make it print a string of your choice. How about: "Camels are bae."

Tip

When you write “real” OCaml code, this is not the interface you’ll be using. You’ll write code in an editor such as Visual Studio Code or Emacs, and you’ll compile it from a terminal. Binder and Live Code are just for interacting seamlessly with the textbook.

Downloadable Pages. Each page of this book is downloadable in a variety of formats. The download icon is at the top right of each page. You’ll always find the original source code of the page, which is usually Markdown—or more precisely MyST Markdown, which is an extension of Markdown for technical writing. Each page is also individually available as PDF, which simply prints from your browser. For the entire book as a PDF, see the paragraph about that below.

Pages with OCaml code cells embedded in them can also be downloaded as Jupyter notebooks. To run those locally on your own machine (instead of in the cloud on Binder), you’ll need to install Jupyter. The easiest way of doing that is typically to install Anaconda. Then you’ll need to install OCaml Jupyter, which requires that you already have OCaml installed. To be clear, there’s no need to install Jupyter or to use notebooks. It’s just another way to interact with this textbook beyond reading it.

Exercises and Solutions. At the end of each chapter except the first, you will find a section of exercises. The exercises are annotated with a difficulty rating:

• One star [★]: easy exercises that should take only a minute or two.

• Two stars [★★]: straightforward exercises that should take a few minutes.

• Three stars [★★★]: exercises that might require anywhere from five to twenty minutes or so.

• Four [★★★★] or more stars: challenging or time-consuming exercises provided for students who want to dig deeper into the material.

It’s possible we’ve misjudged the difficulty of a problem from time to time. Let us know if you think an annotation is off.

Please do not post your solutions to the exercises anywhere, especially not in public repositories where they could be found by search engines. Solutions to most exercises are available. Fall 2022 is the first public release of these solutions. Though they have been available to Cornell students for a few years, it is inevitable that wider circulation will reveal improvements that could be made. We are happy to add or correct solutions. Please make contributions through GitHub.

PDF. A full PDF version of this book is available. It does not contain the embedded videos, annotations, or other features that the HTML version has. It might also have typesetting errors. At this time, no tablet (ePub, etc.) version is available, but most tablets will let you import PDFs.