I have this book, there's interesting chapters like defining arithmetic recursively in SML. You can do this book without previous programming assuming you have domain knowledge to install SML yourself.
There is no answers to the exercises in the book (some selected solutions on the book homepage) but there is an appendix on various patterns and proof techniques, which turned out to be all I needed as many of the exercises you're just writing and checking a program. I assume there's no solutions because the exercises are used for a course. I've always wondered why authors don't have a self-study, Knuth like book with answers contained in it, then sell a seperate instructor pack or something with private exercises to other teachers.
Which is nowhere in the book, it's only referred to as "ML language" so requires assumed domain knowledge such as (1)ML = Standard ML = SML/NJ (2)you know what a REPL is and that it has different commands on different platforms (Ctrl-Z to exit on Windows VS Ctrl-D in *nix) (3)you know commands to load your larger .sml programs into the REPL and all the pitfalls like needing to restart/empty the environment. In the course it's explained but not the book http://cs.wheaton.edu/~tvandrun/previous/spring19/cs243/ml.h...
There is no answers to the exercises in the book (some selected solutions on the book homepage) but there is an appendix on various patterns and proof techniques, which turned out to be all I needed as many of the exercises you're just writing and checking a program. I assume there's no solutions because the exercises are used for a course. I've always wondered why authors don't have a self-study, Knuth like book with answers contained in it, then sell a seperate instructor pack or something with private exercises to other teachers.