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Programming Clojure (book by Stuart Halloway) is out of beta (here's a review)
I just downloaded the updated e-book last night and from a quick glance, it looks roughly the same as the beta one (with fixed typos and code bugs, I assume). I mentioned in a comment a while ago I'd do a review, so here it is.
For those who have never looked at any lisps, I'd recommend reading http://www.moxleystratton.com/article/clojure/for-non-lisp-programmers before jumping into the book, because the intro chapter has a lot of small examples that you can type in the repl as you go along to get a taste of the language. (this also helps get into the mood to drink the koolaid that the chapter throws at you)
The book then shifts into a more in-depth explanations of different aspects of the languages. The major chapters are: syntax and basic concepts, java interop, the sequences library, functional programming, concurrency, macros, multimethods, and a last chapter about how to go about some common tasks in clojure.
The book provides a pretty nice hands-on experience. As the book progresses, by completing the end-of-chapter exercises, you can gradually write an ant-like build tool. One of the chapters also shows how to write a simple snake game.
So far, I only have a couple of critiques:
1 - imho, getting comfortable with a lisp editor is a big deterrent for Java people, and the book doesn't explain much in terms of what sorts of weirdness to expect in the transition (granted, the book isn't about emacs or vim).
2 - I feel the section about destructuring could be longer and use more real-world code samples, as it seems to be a fairly important concept and, at the same time, fairly novel for the non-lisper.
Overall, though, I find it a nice introduction to the language. The e-book has links any time it references any concept (including the table of contents and the index), making it a pretty decent reference book too.
Has anyone else bought it? What do you think of it?
- st3fan 17y agoI think your review is rather short :-)
- lhorie 17y agoWhat else would you like me to talk about?
- pivo 17y agoAs far as setting up emacs to work with clojure, Bill Clementson's blog has some good information: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081205.html http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081205.html
- lhorie 17y agoYeah I tried that, but it wasn't working for me for some reason. I was using Notepad++ until a while back... not exactly a Lisp editor :P Right now, I'm trying out ClojureBox (http://clojure.bighugh.com/ http://clojure.bighugh.com/). The only issue I had installing it was that I had to delete the .emacs file on the root folder to get it to work (probably leftover from my previous failed attempts to get clojure support working).
- runevault 17y agoYeah I use clojurebox to avoid the hassles of getting emacs/slime/etc up and running as well, works great. Been using it since the version and swear by it. Also to the OP, the Moxley Station tutorial is badly out of date and I strongly recommend not using it now, looks unchanged from May of last year, Clojure has changed a lot since then.
- Raphael_Amiard 17y agoOn windows, I use NetBeans + the clojure plugin. You have javadoc, autocompletion, included REPL. Even if it's not finished, it's already quite good as it is. If you're serious about clojure it also offer you a good Java Developpment environnment, wich is a neat thing. On Linux i use Vim + VimClojure. Really nice, but REPL integration is not as nice as in SLIME for sure.
- jefffoster 17y agohttp://technomancy.us/126 http://technomancy.us/126 is an updated set of instructions for setting up Emacs and Clojure. It's been discussed previously (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=629816 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=629816)
- technomancy 17y ago