

Programming Clojure (book by Stuart Halloway) is out of beta (here's a review) - lhorie

I just downloaded the updated e-book last night and from a quick glance, it looks roughly the same as the beta one (with fixed typos and code bugs, I assume). I mentioned in a comment a while ago I'd do a review, so here it is.<p>For those who have never looked at any lisps, I'd recommend reading http://www.moxleystratton.com/article/clojure/for-non-lisp-programmers before jumping into the book, because the intro chapter has a lot of small examples that you can type in the repl as you go along to get a taste of the language. (this also helps get into the mood to drink the koolaid that the chapter throws at you)<p>The book then shifts into a more in-depth explanations of different aspects of the languages. The major chapters are: syntax and basic concepts, java interop, the sequences library, functional programming, concurrency, macros, multimethods, and a last chapter about how to go about some common tasks in clojure.<p>The book provides a pretty nice hands-on experience. As the book progresses, by completing the end-of-chapter exercises, you can gradually write an ant-like build tool. One of the chapters also shows how to write a simple snake game.<p>So far, I only have a couple of critiques:<p>1 - imho, getting comfortable with a lisp editor is a big deterrent for Java people, and the book doesn't explain much in terms of what sorts of weirdness to expect in the transition (granted, the book isn't about emacs or vim).<p>2 - I feel the section about destructuring could be longer and use more real-world code samples, as it seems to be a fairly important concept and, at the same time, fairly novel for the non-lisper.<p>Overall, though, I find it a nice introduction to the language. The e-book has links any time it references any concept (including the table of contents and the index), making it a pretty decent reference book too.<p>Has anyone else bought it? What do you think of it?
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st3fan
I think your review is rather short :-)

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lhorie
What else would you like me to talk about?

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pivo
As far as setting up emacs to work with clojure, Bill Clementson's blog has
some good information:

<http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081205.html>

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lhorie
Yeah I tried that, but it wasn't working for me for some reason. I was using
Notepad++ until a while back... not exactly a Lisp editor :P

Right now, I'm trying out ClojureBox (<http://clojure.bighugh.com/>). The only
issue I had installing it was that I had to delete the .emacs file on the root
folder to get it to work (probably leftover from my previous failed attempts
to get clojure support working).

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Raphael_Amiard
On windows, I use NetBeans + the clojure plugin. You have javadoc,
autocompletion, included REPL. Even if it's not finished, it's already quite
good as it is.

If you're serious about clojure it also offer you a good Java Developpment
environnment, wich is a neat thing.

On Linux i use Vim + VimClojure. Really nice, but REPL integration is not as
nice as in SLIME for sure.

