Mostly wondering how people ship stuff if there are different variants of std libs? Say you write your code entirely using one std lib and then try to share it (the code that is) with somebody who uses a different std lib, then the onus of learning the new std lib is entirely on him, right? How does that work for teams then? I know that Jane Street is a big user and so they have considerable influence. That being said, does the std lib (the one bundled with the distro) have enough features (like all the necessary data structures, for instance) to make using it viable in a non-trivial project (off the top of my head, say writing a very simple web server)? If so then, I suppose that's good enough.
Any recommendations for learning material? I have a copy of "Practical OCaml", don't really like it. INRIA's materials seem quite substantial, but more like reference.
The migration from standard stdlib to alternate ones is fairly trivial(some signatures might differ but typed language means the compiler will catch them for you), so you can start using the stdlib and if you feel like writing some trivial things that should be in the stdlib or you need some advanced data structures you can use the alternate ones.
Also you need `lwt`(most people prefer this)/`async` library for writing concurrent programs like a webserver. `Cohttp` is a good library for doing http based client/servers. I strongly recommend `Real world ocaml` and the reference manual is excellent at looking up some new type-level features. Also reading well-known libraries code is an excellent way to learn a language.
I'll start off with "Real world OCaml" and see how it goes!
Regarding books, Real World Ocaml is very well written, although some examples might need tweaking.