The OPL Optimization Programming Language

It is a good description of constraint programming. The book is very concise - I could read it in a couple of days. It helps to have some logic programming exposure although it is not required to understand the material. One can read the first two chapters and then jump straight to the particular application area that they are most interested in. For example, if you are interested in scheduling applications you could go straight to the scheduling chapter after reading the introduction. There was some information that I wish was covered in the book but was not. 1. It would have helped to know which vendors and products support this language (OPL) and to what extent. 2. I would have liked to see a chapter on integrating OPL programs with programs written in procedural languages such as C/C++ because most real-world applications will not be written entirely in OPL. 3. There could have been one chapter or one example which illustrates how a problem can be expressed using constraints and how the same problem can be expressed in another language or using linear programming to illustrate the advantages of the language. 4. The explanation of how the run-time engine of the language works is sketchy. The book does cover how a user can guide the search space for a problem, but it would be better to explain how the default search mechanisms and heuristics work in greater detail.