This is not the actual cover of the book. It doesn't have one yet. Although, it could look something like this. ;)
Meet Clojure is a brand new book on the Clojure programming language that is still in the early stages of development. It is written by Anthony Grimes and is being published by No Starch Press, known for publishing popular tech books such as Learn You A Haskell and Land of Lisp
Though Clojure is still a very young language, Meet Clojure will be an addition to a large number of existing Clojure books in various stages of completion. However, Meet Clojure would not be coming into existence if it did not serve its own special purpose among these books. Clojure is, at this point in time, one of the few languages left that doesn't have very clear learning materials for beginners. There are plenty of books, but Clojure lacks in tutorials and other free resources. Haskell has Learn You A Haskell, Common Lisp has Practical Common Lisp, but Clojure has nothing. This is where Meet Clojure comes in.
Meet Clojure will be a comprehensive introduction to the Clojure programming language. It is aimed at complete Clojure beginners and all it expects from you is experience in at least one language. It doesn't care what that language is. Meet Clojure is not an in depth book or even a hefty tome. Our very tentative estimation on how many pages it will end up being is somewhere around 300. You won't learn every nook and cranny of Clojure nor will I go into detail on every single topic. Instead, we'll focus on what you need to know to use the language and write your very own Clojure programs.
Meet Clojure is written in a very light-hearted tone. The book is meant to be fun to read and to make you smile and even laugh every now and then. Heavy inspiration is taken from Learn You a Haskell, because I firmly believe that Miran got it right when he wrote that book. If you're looking for a big serious suit-and-tie enterprisy book, this is not the one for you. The majority of the examples are meant to be comical and fun, because Meet Clojure wants you to have a fantastic time learning Clojure.
Meet Clojure will take you on a tornadic tour through Clojure beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. Towards the end of the book, you'll write some of your very own projects with my guidence, and you'll even learn how to use and write plugins for the cake build tool. The book is focused on practicality so GUI, web, and interactive development are some things you'll be introduced to. You'll get to try these things first hand. Meet Clojure is a very interactive book. It's designed to be read with a Clojure REPL running at all times and whenever possible, the examples are shown being ran in a REPL or produced in such a way that you can run them yourself in your own REPL.
Furthermore, as I hinted earlier, No Starch Press is allowing me to provide my own version of the text online in any formats I wish for free. When the book is finished, I plan to offer it in various formats including HTML similar to how Learn You A Haskell is presented. I started writing this book with no intention of publishing it and with every intention of offering it for free, because it's something that the Clojure community really needs. I made a promise to the community to offer my book for free and that promise will be kept. The awesome thing is that you'll be able to buy the book as well. Some people just really like dead tree books. There is something to be said about the feel of real paper between one's fingers. Meet Clojure will be the first Clojure book to be freely available. I take pride in that, and I feel that it will be a very important step towards the widespread adoption of the Clojure programming language.
Meet Clojure doesn't have a release date yet.
Tentative Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Meet Clojure
- Getting all hot and functional
- [\s \e \q \u \e \n \c \e \s]
- (Java/interop)
- Concurrency can kill you
- ))))))))))))))))))))))))
- Yo dawg, I heard you like data...
- Pawlymorphism (this chapter has puppies)
- Having your cake and eating it too
- srs bsns
- Webdev...jure?
- Ew, it's all GUI!
- user=> (interactive-development)
- Entering the Clojure world