Wrapping Up

This has been a long chapter. But think about how much ground you’ve covered: you can work with basic Clojure data and collections, define and call functions, work with Java APIs, manage namespaces, and read and write metadata. You can write purely functional code, and yet you can easily introduce side effects when you need to. You’ve also met Lisp concepts including reader macros, special forms, and destructuring.

While we’ll still introduce many features of Clojure in the remainder of the book, virtually all of it (macros are a notable counter-example) is built upon the syntax and structures introduced so far.

Next, we’ll dive into sequences, a grand unifying abstraction over how we traverse and transform data in Clojure.