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Book suggestions are always so difficult to recommend. I've been asked this question many times, but honestly, it's hard for me, because I'm really not much of a (text)book learner. I know Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is supposed to be excellent, but honestly books like that just put me to sleep. It's part of the reason why I've put so much effort into my slides. I'll say that if you want to learn functional programming in particular (in OCaml), the recently released second edition of "Real World OCaml" is an excellent reference. That one might lean more into specific OCaml language constructs than general programming know-how, though. Otherwise, along with my notes and slides, I think the most important thing to do is just to pick a task and do it. It doesn't need to be something standalone, but I think everyone learning to program should program an expression evaluator, a priority queue, binary search, BFS, tree traversal, what-have-you. I know that the OCaml website also has a list of exercises: https://ocaml.org/problems Robert Harper also has a book, "Programming in Standard ML", though that one doesn't have exercises, so my slides are meant to cover the same kind of material. It's here anyways, though: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/isml/book.pdf I hope this helps! P.S. That Brown schedule looks absolutely intimidating. I'm not sure I could have handled Racket as a first-time programmer. I think it's so important to have a solid conceptual model of what the program is doing before you go into more advanced stuff -- our class only learned higher-order functions today, after 5 weeks of SML! |