The authors of this book have taken an ambitious and aggressive approach to teaching Clojure. You know how everyone loves to say they teach using the “drinking from a fire hydrant” method? Well, at times it feels like these guys are trying to shove that fire hydrant right up... let’s just say it’s a place where you don’t normally put a fire hydrant. This isn’t intended as a first book on programming, and it may not be an ideal first book on Clojure either. The authors assume you’re fearless and, importantly, equipped with a search engine. You’ll want to have Google handy as you go through the examples. The authors blaze through many of the classics of both functionalprogramming and industry programming in a whirlwind tour of Clojure that feels at times more like a class-five tropical storm. You’ll learn fast!
Our industry, the global programming community, is fashion-driven to a degree that would embarrass haute couture designers from New York to Paris. We’re slaves to fashion. Fashion dictates the programming languages people study in school, the languages employers hire for, the languages that get to be in books on shelves. A naive outsider might wonder if the quality of a language matters a little, just a teeny bit at least, but in the real world fashion trumps all.
So nobody could be more surprised than I that a Lisp dialect has suddenly become fashionable again. Clojure has only been out for three years, but it’s gaining momentum at a rate that we haven’t seen in a new language in decades. And it doesn’t even have a “killer app” yet, in the way that browsers pushed JavaScript into the spotlight, or Rails propelled Ruby. Or maybe the killer app for Clojure is the JVM itself. Everyone’s fed up with the Java language, but understandably we don’t want to abandon our investment in the Java Virtual Machine and its capabilities: the libraries, the configuration, the monitoring, and all the other entirely valid reasons we still use it.
Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. The Joy of Clojure goes beyond the syntax, and shows how to write fluent, idiomatic Clojure code. Readers will learn to approach programming challenges from a Functional perspective and master the Lisp techniques that make Clojure so elegant and efficient.
According to the authors, there's a "right way" to do things in Clojure. This book will help readers think about problems the "Clojure way," and recognize when they simply need to change the way they program. Not just another book about programming philosophy, The Joy of Clojure tackles hard software areas like concurrency, interoperability, performance, and more.