I am working through this coursea course via YouTube and I also found some github repos that have the course's homework material. https://www.coursera.org/course/proglang
The first language is ML and than moves to Racket. Really learned a ton just doing the first weeks. It is more of a CS 202 Programming Languages course which was perfect for me since I really wanted to learn more about functional programming.
I took the second live offering of Dan Grossman's class on Coursera in fall 2013. There was another in the last year, so if the pattern holds, there would be another in the next few months or so.
I sure hope so I really liked his style. At first I was like oh no another syntax is 75% of material, but it ended up being described and explained clearly.
The best part of the course for me was that it gave me an excuse to learn Emacs and a framework in which to do it. Painful no doubt, but now I have become spoiled.
I'm not sure if SML can catch up with OCaml's nice tooling (opam, merlin, Core, etc...), even if it feels a bit cleaner language to me. A Shame, but merits of a programming language are not proportional to its success.
Edit. Oh, and here's a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433860
I've not read it, but if it's by Robert Harper it's probably a highly reliable source of information.
Not sure. This was the book I used: http://www.it.dtu.dk/introSML/
There are plenty of suggestions here http://www.smlnj.org/doc/literature.html
SML has been on the higher ranks of my to-learn stack, because apparently it has some nice features Haskell does not, most notably I've heard great things about the module system.