Who This Book Is For

Clojure is a powerful, general-purpose programming language. As such, this book is for programmers with experience in a programming language like Java, C#, Python, or Ruby, but new to Clojure and looking for a powerful, elegant language.

Clojure is built on top of the Java Virtual Machine, and it is fast. This book will be of particular interest to Java programmers who want the expressiveness of a dynamic language without compromising on performance.

Clojure is helping to redefine what features belong in a general-purpose language. If you program in Lisp, use a functional language such as Haskell, or write explicitly concurrent programs, you’ll enjoy Clojure. Clojure combines ideas from Lisp, functional programming, and concurrent programming and makes them more approachable to programmers seeing these ideas for the first time.

Clojure is part of a larger phenomenon. Languages such as Erlang, F#, Haskell, and Scala have garnered attention recently for their support of functional programming or their concurrency model. Enthusiasts of these languages will find much common ground with Clojure.