I read Programming Clojure a few months ago; I meant to write a review of it then, but I was busy and then forgot. Better late than never, though, so I’m going to do it now. Clojure, as you may know, is a Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM. It is a very modern Lisp - Clojure 1.0 celebrated it’s first anniversary recently. It can integrate with Java libraries, nullifying the complaints that Lisp doesn’t have enough libraries, and has very good concurrency support.
Programming Clojure was a very good book for helping to get started with Clojure. I had already done a few small projects with it, but hadn’t used it in any substantial way. This book covered all of the features of Clojure, including all of the neat concurrency stuff that I probably wouldn’t have run into on my own for a while. This book provides a good overview of all the features of Clojure, as well as simple examples of how to use them. I still refer to it when writing Clojure code.
In addition to talking about the language features in isolation, there is an overarching project throughout the book that is used to show the features in a real application. This is pretty interesting, even though you’d probably never have to write a build system in real life. This project starts simpler, and then gradually uses more of the concepts you learn in each chapter, making it a great way to follow along and ensure you actually understood what you read in the book. It’s fairly short; I recommend everyone who reads the book should make sure they understand the project.
I’d highly recommend this book if you are interested in learning or getting better at Clojure. It will help you understand how to use Clojure to create real projects. It explains how to use clojure, some of the issues you may initially have with them (printing in lazy sequences, for example), and how to overcome them.
