Programming Clojure
Describes Clojure, a Lisp-based programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine.
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- Maybe in some parts of the world (including mine). But we haven’t have a lot of computers either. But 25 years ago, there was a lot of textbooks and computers editors like O’Reilly already active. I had the C programming language book (not 25 years ago, but the book is older than that) and you could learn a lot with that one book and codeblocks. Same thing with “The Go Programming Language”, “Learning Perl”, and “Programming Clojure”. You only need one book to get very decent.
- Programming Clojure's Fourth Edition was published earlier this year, so it should be very current. Alex Miller is a great writer. It's in the ~2 USD purchase :))
- You can still do it too, but you need to see through the fad and not go for the shiniest technology out there. I've been reading "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" because it's basically the best explanation about OpenBSD as it (and NetBSD) still follow the same general architecture.
Another book that's worth its weight is "The Linux Programming Interface" and "The TCP/IP Guide". Also you can probably buy "The Go Programming Language", "Programming Erlang", and "Programming Clojure" and still come ahead. As long as you choose to learn technologies that have thoughtful design, or has a standard (even a de-facto one), you're golden.
- From the discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37000562) it seems like there are many people have shown interest in Clojure but never tried to learn it or couldn't make it stick. So I thought I'd share my favorite resources when I was learning Clojure:
Programming Clojure https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Stuart-Halloway/dp/1934356867
The Joy of Clojure https://www.manning.com/books/the-joy-of-clojure-second-edition
The Bay Area Clojure User Group https://www.meetup.com/the-bay-area-clojure-user-group/ (unfortunately it looks like their last event was in 2022)
What are some resources you all have found useful?
- This is an excellent comment and it matches my experience with the language very closely. After a career with many languages and paradigms (C, C++, Java, javascript, Swift...), then pushed to do Clojure the past 3 years, all the points you make above became so obvious that is in now EXTREMELY painful to work in any of the other languages.
I think a couple pain points need to be remedied in the community so that Clojure is more inviting to the general programmer, who like you mentioned would ultimately have an easier time with Clojure once bootstrapped into the language.
The primary one for me was being met with Emacs out of the gate as the preferred and touted editor for Clojure. I dove into that for a good year, became proficient with it but sorely regretted it. It was a decision point and cognitive hurdle I wish wasn't even presented to me in the beginning. IntelliJ/Cursive or something like it is a better way for most newcomers.
Earlier books on Clojure were way to "intellectual" in my opinion and pretty offputting to the general programmer. Luckily that area has improved in recent years with books such as "Getting Clojure" and "Programming Clojure"
Also the newcomer could be confused about what a repl is and how it functions with the IDE or editor. It would be better if editors and plugins focused on raw Socket or prepl repls over middleware repls like nrepl.
I would hope actually that some resources in the community would make an awesome LSP Server for Clojure so that any editor that supports LSP would have a great Cursive like experience. "clojure-lsp" is a great start but needs more resources.
The points made above by puredanger are so very true in my experience and I am so lucky and joyful to be working on Clojure systems.
- I don't think there's a single best Clojure book, so I'll recommend several (all available on Safari if you have that). For general language, syntax, idioms:
* The Joy of Clojure (whirlwind tour of the language and Clojure philosophy.) * Brave Clojure (A very wordy, hand-holdy approach. I really like this one for dense topics like core.async which can take time to wrap your head around) * Programming Clojure - just an all around solid reference. Once you've got a command of the language, this becomes more valuable imo .
Now, there's a large gap between knowing Clojure's syntax and writing effective programs in the language. Clojure is not Python, or Haskell, or Java, and, as such, you don't build programs in the same way. So, as a final recommendation, I'd suggest the book Clojure Applied. This book deals with going from "I know the language" to "I know how to build things in the language"
For the web, get ready to beat your head against a wall for hours and hours on end ^_^. Lisp's "small pieces" philosophy is both a blessing and a curse. Outside of a framework called Luminus, and a few leiningen templates, the way to do things in Clojure land is by stitching a bunch of ad-hoc libraries together by hand, which means a lot of evaluation of not-too-popular github repos.
Once you've got everything dialed in though, it's an absolute joy to use.
