Clojure in Action [Paperback]

Amit Rathore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2011

Summary

Clojure in Action is a hands-on tutorial for the working programmer who has written code in a language like Java or Ruby, but has no prior experience with Lisp. It teaches Clojure from the basics to advanced topics using practical, real-world application examples. Blow through the theory and dive into practical matters like unit-testing and environment set-up, all the way through building a scalable web-application using domain-specific languages, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ.

About the Technology

Clojure is a modern Lisp for the JVM, and it has the strengths you'd expect: first-class functions, macros, support for functional programming, and a Lisp-like, clean programming style.

About this Book

Clojure in Action is a practical guide focused on applying Clojure to practical programming challenges. You'll start with a language tutorial written for readers who already know OOP. Then, you'll dive into the use cases where Clojure really shines: state management, safe concurrency and multicore programming, first-class code generation, and Java interop. In each chapter, you'll first explore the unique characteristics of a problem area and then discover how to tackle them using Clojure. Along the way, you'll explore practical matters like architecture, unit testing, and set-up as you build a scalable web application that includes custom DSLs, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ.

What's Inside

• A fast-paced Clojure tutorial
• Creating web services with Clojure
• Scaling through messaging
• Creating DSLs with Clojure's macro system
• Test-driven development with Clojure
• Distributed programming with Clojure and more

This book assumes you're familiar with an OO language like Java, C#, or C++, but requires no background in Lisp or Clojure itself.

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Table of Contents

PART 1 GETTING STARTED

1. Introduction to Clojure
2. A whirlwind tour
3. Building blocks of Clojure
4. Polymorphism with multimethods
5. Clojure and Java interop
6. State and the concurrent world
7. Evolving Clojure through macros

PART 2 GETTING REAL

8. Test-driven development and more
9. Data storage with Clojure
10. Clojure and the web
11. Scaling through messaging
12. Data processing with Clojure
13. More on functional programming
14. Protocols, records, and type
15. More macros and DSLs

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Amit Rathore is a VP of Engineering and has a decade of experience building highly performant, data-heavy web applications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications; 1 edition (November 17, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935182595
• ISBN-13: 978-1935182597
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book, February 2, 2012

By 

Duraid (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clojure in Action (Paperback)

I'm coming to Clojure from C# and, as the author puts it, it's a daunting journey. There is a lot to learn. The functional paradigm, lisp specifics (macros etc), clojure specifics (STM, persitent data structures, protocols, etc). It's not like learning python or ruby. It's fundamentally differnt ball game. I read a lot of stuff online and I read "Practical Clojure" that was published before this book but all of them were ranting about how great and superior Clojure is to everything else which wasn't very helpful and actually is annoying.

This book was different. It's all practical and zero BS and it shows step by step the clojure way. For example I liked how clojure multi-methods polymorphism was explained. It starts by showing the limitation of single dispatch and then showing alternatives in Java through the visitor pattern and then shows clojure multimethods. All of course is done through writing code. Now I know exactly the problem that multimethods solves and I'm confident to apply them in my design.

A similar example is protocols where the author builds an equivalent functionality to protocols with multi-methods and then replaces them at the end with protocols which make you understand exactly why protocls exist and when to use them.

I also learned about things I wasn't expecting to learn when I bought this book like the expression problem, multiple dispatch and also HBase, Hadoop, RabbitMQ and other components that are essential to modern application architecture and how to work with them in clojure.

I would like to thank the author for the apparent effort and passion he put in this book. Congratulations, job perfectly done.

When you learn Clojure (and Lisp in general) you don't learn about a better technology only, you also learn about better people.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent intro to Clojure, December 20, 2011

By 

SteveSJ76 "stevesj76" (Washington, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clojure in Action (Paperback)

This was the ideal book for me to start learning Clojure with. As an experienced programmer, but new to Lisp and Clojure, I found this book very helpful. It is clear and well written, and moves through concepts at just the right pace. I found Clojure in Action more palpable than The Joy of Clojure (which I plan to read next). I am also reading The Little Schemer at the same time as Clojure in Action and I highly recommend this approach. That said, there was a chapter or two that seemed like it could have used a bit more editing. Still, I highly recommend this book.