Bill Clementson's Blog

 Bits and pieces (mostly Lisp-related) that I collect from the ether.

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Programming Clojure beta book now available

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

I've been learning Clojure recently (see posts here, here, here, here, here), so was pleased to see that the "beta" PDF version of Stuart Halloway's new Clojure book Programming Clojure is now available.

Programming Clojure book

The description of the book is:

"If you're a Java programmer, if you care about concurrency, or if you enjoy working in low-ceremony language such as Ruby or Python, Programming Clojure is for you. Clojure is a general-purpose language with direct support for Java, a modern Lisp dialect, and support in both the language and data structures for functional programming. Programming Clojure shows you how to write applications that have the beauty and elegance of a good scripting language, the power and reach of the JVM, and a modern, concurrency-safe functional style. Now you can write beautiful code that runs fast and scales well."
The main chapters in the beta Table of Contents (which may change) are:
  1. Getting Started
  2. Exploring Clojure
  3. Working with Java
  4. Unifying Data with Sequences
  5. Functional Programming
  6. Concurrency
  7. Macros
  8. Multimethods
  9. Clojure-Contrib: Clojure's Standard Library
  10. Case Study
In addition, there are a Preface and Appendixes. Currently, the Preface and Chapters 1,2,3,4, & 6 and some of the Appendixes are available (in beta form) in the PDF. As with other beta books from The Pragmatic Programmers, you can buy either just the PDF version (for $21.00) of the book or PDF+paper book combo package (for $41.35). The paper version of Programming Clojure is scheduled to be released in March, 2009; however, you can get the PDF beta version of the book now. The PDF will be updated on a regular basis until the paper book is available. I found this quite a useful option when I purchased the Programming Erlang book as it gives you access to the material in the book before it's generally available and (since there is a book forum), you can tell the author about mistakes or suggest ideas for inclusion in the book (which means that the book becomes better for you and for others!).

The author of the book is Stuart Halloway, who has authored a number of Java books and is quite active on the Clojure Google Groups mailing list. Stuart also has a blog series in which he converted code from Peter Seibel's book Practical Common Lisp from CL to Clojure.

I've purchased the combo pack (I like paper books but find digital copies easier for searching and copy/paste of code), so I'm looking forward to reading it and following progress as Stuart adds material and fleshes out the remaining chapters of the book!

emacs Copyright © 2008 by Bill Clementson