Real World OCaml: Functional programming for the masses

This fast-moving tutorial introduces you to OCaml, an industrial-strength programming language designed for expressiveness, safety, and speed. Through the book’s many examples, you’ll quickly learn how OCaml stands out as a tool for writing fast, succinct, and readable systems code.

Real World OCaml takes you through the concepts of the language at a brisk pace, and then helps you explore the tools and techniques that make OCaml an effective and practical tool. In the book’s third section, you’ll delve deep into the details of the compiler toolchain and OCaml’s simple and efficient runtime system.

• Learn the foundations of the language, such as higher-order functions, algebraic data types, and modules
• Explore advanced features such as functors, first-class modules, and objects
• Leverage Core, a comprehensive general-purpose standard library for OCaml
• Design effective and reusable libraries, making the most of OCaml’s approach to abstraction and modularity
• Tackle practical programming problems from command-line parsing to asynchronous network programming
• Examine profiling and interactive debugging techniques with tools such as GNU gdb

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 A Guided Tour
Chapter 2 Variables and Functions
Chapter 3 Lists and Patterns
Chapter 4 Files, Modules, and Programs
Chapter 5 Records
Chapter 6 Variants
Chapter 7 Error Handling
Chapter 8 Imperative Programming
Chapter 9 Functors
Chapter 10 First-Class Modules
Chapter 11 Objects
Chapter 12 Classes
Chapter 13 Maps and Hash Tables
Chapter 14 Command-Line Parsing
Chapter 15 Handling JSON Data
Chapter 16 Parsing with OCamllex and Menhir
Chapter 17 Data Serialization with S-Expressions
Chapter 18 Concurrent Programming with Async
Chapter 19 Foreign Function Interface
Chapter 20 Memory Representation of Values
Chapter 21 Understanding the Garbage Collector
Chapter 22 The Compiler Frontend: Parsing and Type Checking
Chapter 23 The Compiler Backend: Bytecode and Native code