Programming Clojure
June 28, 2009
A few weeks ago I received my printed copy of Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway in the mail. I had been a technical reviewer of the book so I was excited to see it finally in print. In case you haven't heard of it yet, Clojure is a programming language designed by Rich Hickey, a Lisp dialect, that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and is designed support concurrent programming.
Clojure has excellent documentation and Rich has posted several great videos of talks he has given that cover the rational for Clojure as well as an introduction into the major concepts. I highly recommend that you watch those videos if you haven't already because Rich does a great job explaining why concurrency is hard using the typical Object-Oriented model that we program in today and how the features of Clojure support a better model for concurrency. Whether you are programming in Java, C#, Erlang, Haskell, Python, Ruby, etc., you will probably be able to learn something from these talks, and plus Rich is just an interesting guy to listen to.
So after all that, you might be saying why do we need a book about Clojure? The answer is that although the documentation is good, it can be a little intimidating when first learning Clojure. For programmers with little or no Lisp or functional programming experience, figuring out how to do basic things the idiomatic way in Clojure can be a daunting task. Stuart's book does an excellent job filling this gap.
The book covers all the major feature of Clojure and is very up-to-date. As a reviewer I got to see the evolution of this book from revision to revision and it was amazing to me to see how much work Stuart put in. Chapters were often completely re-written to keep up with changes in the language that occurred before it stabilized in a 1.0 release. I think the final product greatly benefited from that work and is an excellent resource for learning Clojure. I encourage you to pick up a copy today.
