More OCaml Book Portal

This book forgoes the abstract and instead provides concrete examples to help you better leverage the unique properties of Elixir, Erlang, and BEAM.

John Whitington

More OCaml picks up where OCaml from the Very Beginning left off. This intermediate-level book takes you deeper into functional programming with OCaml, exploring key language features and classic algorithms along the way. Each chapter includes exercises, hints, and worked answers to reinforce your understanding. You’ll wrap up by building a complete project that generates PDF files, a practical example that pulls everything together.

Whether you’re already working in OCaml and want to sharpen your skills, or you’re an experienced programmer exploring functional languages, you’ll find something new here, or even see an old idea in a new light.

A copy of OCaml from the Very Beginning is included without charge along with your purchase.

When I wrote OCaml from the Very Beginning, the goal was to create a book a bright newcomer to programming could follow without prerequisites. This book builds on the foundation laid in the first, but is written for readers with some experience, either from working through the earlier book or from programming in another functional language like Haskell or Standard ML.

In most real-world projects, you face two kinds of complexity: one kind comes from the problem itself, and the other kind comes from navigating a language’s ecosystem of third-party libraries. This book focuses entirely on the first. Using only the OCaml Standard Library, we’ll explore how to tackle complexity through abstraction.

The book is made up of sixteen short chapters that fall into three broad categories: Some introduce OCaml syntax and features through worked examples; others dig into practical topics like input and output; others take small detours into puzzles and diversions.

You’ll finish by building a complete project: a program that generates PDF files with drawings and text. Every chapter includes exercises with hints and full worked answers.

This work was written and produced entirely by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

John Whitington founded a software company which uses OCaml to process PDF documents. For many years, he taught functional programming to students of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, and continues educating through his books.