Part 2. Getting real

The first part of this book focuses on basics. You’re now ready to use your new knowledge to build things. In this part of the book, we’ll focus on a number of things that you’ll likely encounter as you work on your real-world projects. Specifically, we’ll focus on unit testing, database access, creating web services, working with messaging systems, and more.

After this, we’ll concentrate on data-processing applications of Clojure by exploring the Map/Reduce paradigm. This will help strengthen your grasp of functional programming. We’ll even build our own little parallel, distributed programming framework to process streams of data. We’ll also address the notion of object-oriented programming in order to really understand what it means. In order to prove that Clojure transcends traditional OO, we’ll build our own OO framework. Finally, we’ll look at advanced uses for macros and domain-specific languages (DSLs).

At the end of these chapters, you’ll be ready to build large-scale systems using Clojure. Perhaps more important, you’ll be proficient enough in Clojure to use it in all your work. Indeed, you may be spoiled for any other programming language.