Customer Reviews

Clojure in Action

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.