What’s in This Book
Chapter 1, Getting Started demonstrates Clojure’s elegance as a general-purpose language, plus the functional style and concurrency model that make Clojure unique. It also walks you through installing Clojure and developing code interactively at the REPL.
Chapter 2, Exploring Clojure is a breadth-first overview of all of Clojure’s core constructs. After this chapter, you’ll be able to read most day-to-day Clojure code.
The next two chapters cover functional programming. Chapter 3, Unifying Data with Sequences shows how all data can be unified under the powerful sequence metaphor.
Chapter 4, Functional Programming shows you how to write functional code in the same style used by the sequence library.
Chapter 5, Specifications demonstrates how to write specifications for your data structures and functions and use them to aid in development and testing.
Chapter 6, State and Concurrency delves into Clojure’s concurrency model. Clojure provides four powerful models for dealing with concurrency, plus all of the goodness of Java’s concurrency libraries.
Chapter 7, Protocols and Datatypes walks through records, types, and protocols in Clojure. These concepts were introduced in Clojure 1.2.0 and enhanced in 1.3.0.
Chapter 8, Macros shows off Lisp’s signature feature. Macros take advantage of the fact that Clojure code is data to provide metaprogramming abilities that are difficult or impossible in anything but a Lisp.
Chapter 9, Multimethods covers one of Clojure’s answers to polymorphism. Polymorphism usually means “take the class of the first argument and dispatch a method based on that.” Clojure’s multimethods let you choose any function of all the arguments and dispatch based on that.
Chapter 10, Java Interop shows you how to call Java from Clojure and call Clojure from Java. You’ll see how to take Clojure straight to the metal and get Java-level performance.
Finally, Chapter 11, Building an Application provides a view into a complete Clojure workflow. You will build an application from scratch, working through solving the various parts to a problem and thinking about simplicity and quality.