OCaml from the Very Beginning

Coming from a Python background and wanting to learn OCaml, I have found this book to be very accessible as a tutorial - far more so than the Real World OCaml which, though excellent, is dive-into-the-deepend stuff quite fast, and also mixed in with too many Jane Street specifics too soon. Here is a great book to get you started on the learning curve of OCaml. As the other reviewers said, it's deceptively easy going, but actually these light chapters are quite dense if you go through some of the latter questions at the end of each.What I like most about it is that it has that concise, incremental, orthogonally organised feeling that mirrors what I expect to get out of functional programming itself.One could argue that it is a mite expensive for a 190 page book that uses a lot of whitespace (that's a positive for organization and readability, as an aside), but then OCaml is not really mainstream and one has to accept that this book will have a relatively low print run, and therefore I won't begrudge it a star on this point as I would much rather pay a few pounds more and have this book exist.

Really good book which I understood more than my university lecturer

Great start!

With a background in imperative language, I found it is quite hard to learn functional language. I've tried many OCaml tutorial, and found this is the best one for me. It was written for first year graduates without any programming experience, so it gives me a clear picture of the basis of functional programming.

easy understanding

Happy with this, no problems at all :)

DO NOT BUY THE KINDLE EDITION!The code is in a completely unreadable 5 point font. Even bumping up the reading font doesn't increase their size.

This book is very well structured. For those new to programming this book is a great introductory text - may be a bit fast - but for those familiar with non-functional languages this book is a quick, easy and motivating way to get up and going with OCaml. If you are an experienced programmer that is new to OCaml I highly recommend you pick this up and quickly go through it (should take < 15 hrs w/ examples) before moving onto other texts. A lot of the other texts for example Real World OCaml get really quick really fast spending only a brief moment on helping you think and practice in the "OCaml way".The books topics are well structure with all of the basics covered. The examples are also very doable with both solutions and hints - there aren't for example any really obnoxious examples all are fair and sufficiently interesting. By the end of the book you build a simply command line app.This book however isn't the be all end all of OCaml - for example this only briefly covers modules (modules are very very different than for example's Java private/protected/public and to me one of the more challenging aspects of the language to understand...). It also doesn't touch upon functional concepts such as monads, functors, memoization, etc. But as far as getting your feet wet and developing an appreciation for the language this does a great job and I highly recommend it.Edit - looks like most of content that I mentioned above that is left out is addressed in John Whitington's second book - More OCaml