Elements of ML Programming, ML97 Edition

Even if you have no plans to use ML, I still think you should read this book. There are three reasons why I think you should read this book: (1) The writing is beautiful. It is always good to read beautiful writing. (2) The pattern matching that ML provides is wonderful. I have become more aware of the power of pattern matching in both programming and other aspects of life. (3) ML is a nice programming language. Andrew Appel once wrote: ML is well suited to many applications, but compiler implementation in particular seems to hit all of its strong points and few of its weaknesses. Implementing a compiler in ML is quite a pleasant task.

Examples and exposition are overall great. Jokes are clever and the tone is light through the book. It reads much like the Perl book by Lary Wall. It hits topics a bit slower than SICP. The biggest problem with this book is it left me felling "Ok, I know the syntax/semantics, now what?" This is a common problem with intro to programming books, and I don't fault it too much for that.The biggest weakness of this book in my opinion is it didn't strongly teach a "style" that I can adopt into my own programs (but then, no FP programming book I've ever read does). It did great teaching functional programming, but as with most intro-to-fp books forgot that real programs don't fit in one file and are several thousand lines of code.Sean

Excellent ML introduction for those learning any language of this family - Haskell, Ocaml, Elm, F# and so forth

It is an excellent book.It is very hard to find a book that explains the code thoroughly.However,this book is an outstanding and easy to read

My boyfriend needed this book for a class he is taking. Good but not the best quality.

I got this book because its recommended in a textbook. I found it useless. I know enough programming. I needed a quick reference to find how to map programming idioms into ML syntax. This book doesn't serve that purpose. For instance, just a few days ago I wanted to find how to access an element of a tuple. I wasn't able to find it quickly. Had to Google. I wanted to find how to write a classic repeat-until or while-do loop (I know its not functional style, but that's what I needed at that time), I couldn't ML's while-do loop in it.

A great introduction to ML. I am using this book as a reference/source of ML practices in my Programming Languages course. In chapter 5 where currying and high order functions are analyzed, the book gets dense but equally more interesting.

This programming book was one of my least favorite to read. I have read much better Java and Python books. I would look for a different ML book to buy if you want to learn this language unfortunately I don't think there are many out there for ML