> The author is currently writing a book about OCaml that is now available in alpha format from here:
http://www.realworldocaml.org/
For anyone else trying to take a peek, authorizing github doesn't necessarily grant you access as there is some sort of whitelisting of allowed github handles. They should make it obvious in the copywriting that not all github accounts can take a peek.
"To login and view the book, you will need a free Github account to authenticate with."
This sounds like you just authenticate with github and be on your merry way.
Ah, yes. There is a whitelist. Even though the book website is 'public' it hasn't really been advertised (apart from the initial "Hey, we're writing a book!" announcement [1]). There were already lots of reviewers for the alpha stages so not much need to attract more.
The beta stage might be different as the early 'bugs' will have been squashed so that phase of writing might take a different approach.
I'm really interested in learning OCaml, but when I tried to view the book it asked for access to read my public information and update my public repositories. Seriously?
The book is not finished yet, and right now it is meant for reviewers to comment on the book:
"Once authenticated, you will see that every paragraph has a comments link beside it. Simply enter your feedback in there, and a Github issue will automatically be created on your behalf. "
If you simply want to read the book then I suggest you wait until it is finished.
It does state on the page that when you login with GitHub "..., you temporarily grant us access to your public repositories. However, we do not store your authorization tokens on the server side, and instead use a cookie on your browser. To log out, you simply delete the cookie"
The next paragraph explains why. Essentially, Github issues are being used to track and deal with reviewers' comments.
On the one hand, OCaml is a very interesting language and I welcome a good book about it in the vein of Real World Haskell. On the other hand, it is the height of treason for O'Reilly to make a book with a camel on the cover that isn't about Perl :v
The author is currently writing a book about OCaml that is now available in alpha format from here:
http://www.realworldocaml.org/
I've finished the first part and looked at the compiler section, and I love this book, no affiliation in any way.