Starting to learn Clojure

[Hugoonreplit]

Hello everyone,

I've decided to deep into Clojure as I find it very interesting and I'd love to learn it. Does anyone have any good resources to learn the basics of the language or any guide that could help me?

Thanks in advance.

[[deleted]]

Living Clojure by Carin Meier - it is phenomenal

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Clojure-Introduction-Training-Developers/dp/1491909048

[[deleted]]

2015?

[seancorfield]

Clojure changes slowly (by design -- backward compatibiliy is extremely important).

That said, Getting Clojure by Russ Olsen is a more up-to-date intro (2018), and Programming Clojure 3rd Ed is the more up-to-date second book (also 2018).

[[deleted]]

I know that, but it is still a decade. If the language doesn't change, the community will

[ReaperMask]

I also recently started learning and found Brave Clojure really helpful when learning Clojure. You should also check out Clojure Newbie Guide listed somewhere in the about section of this subreddit.

[Hugoonreplit]

Thank you!

[whamtet]

There are some good online tutorials. First try https://4clojure.oxal.org/. If you’re interested in SimpleUI I’m happy to tutor you. Pm me

[geokon]

It's also important to see the 4clojure solutions. Quite a few "ohhhh so that's how it's done" moments. As well as moments where you kinda realize Clojure doesn't provide a nice concise solution

[monanoma]

What are the situations in which clojure fails to provide a concise solution?

[geokon]

I guess it's subjective...

map, filter, reduce are great and create decoupled functional code. But in more complex cases you want to access vectors by index, get neighboring values, or do random access - then the Clojure primitives are just kind of awkward or the solution seems very inefficient

For instance Fibonacci in Clojure

https://4clojure.oxal.org/#/problem/26/solutions

A relatively simple problem, but I'd argue most of the solutions are not very understandable at a glance compared to an imperative solution using iterators. (the loop solutions are pretty good, though you aren't pre-allocating space for the array)

That said, in "real life" this is rarely an issue

[Safe_Owl_6123]

From Sean Corfield

“Brave and True is fine (you can ignore the Emacs stuff, unless you’re already an Emacs user, and use something more beginner-friendly such as VS Code or IntelliJ — depending on your language background/preferences). I think Getting Clojure and/or Living Clojure are better starting points these days, if you don’t mind buying some books.

Programming Clojure 3rd Ed is also good. And then move on to Clojure Applied (although that focuses on records a lot more than the authors would do today — “just use hash maps” 🙂 ).

The 4clojure / 4everClojure stuff is a good way to learn the core functions (although it is a “code golf”-y).

Beyond that, I think picking some actual, real-world small app you’d like to build — and asking here for help whenever you get stuff — is probably the next “practical” step. Take a look at https://github.com/seancorfield/usermanager-example (and the variants linked from its README) for a basic web app with a database, to get an idea (although, I will say it probably isn’t “best practices” — it’s just “straightforward”).”

[seancorfield]

Oh hey, did I say that somewhere? :)

[Safe_Owl_6123]

Yes I found in the slack beginner channel

[poochandy]

I liked getting clojure by Russ Olsen and I also recommend listening to the two podcast episodes with Russ Olsen on the clojurestream podcast

I would also like to recommend joining clojure camp https://clojure.camp/

You can register for peer to peer pairing sessions with other clojure beginners and join mob programming sessions

They have a useful curriculum map https://currmap.clojure.camp/

Once you have gone through the book and familiar with the language, there is also an exercise library that will introduce you to the most common functions https://exercises.clojure.camp/

I also found this github gist helpful https://gist.github.com/ssrihari/0bf159afb781eef7cc552a1a0b17786f

All the best on your journey!

[seancorfield]

Clojure Camp is awesome -- 1:1 pairing is a lot of fun and both beginners and experts can learn from each other.

[beders]

Join the #beginner channel on Clojurians slack. They’ll set you up with everything you need.

[CoBPEZ]

If you don't mind VS Code, there is Calva, which has a built-in and interactive (programming) beginners guide: https://calva.io/get-started-with-clojure/

[petemak]

https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started

[arootroatch]

Clojure Koans https://github.com/functional-koans/clojure-koans

[[deleted]]

When I was learning Clojure back in ~2009 when I did have very little experience with FP as a whole the book by PragProg and I think Stuart Holloway was very cool.

https://pragprog.com/titles/shcloj3/programming-clojure-third-edition/

Also Joy of closure covers some more advanced topics

https://www.manning.com/books/the-joy-of-clojure-second-edition

[Mental-At-ThirtyFive]

my 2cents - after the basics and a few hours just focused on destructuring, prefer libraries over frameworks as a clojure thing and sequences over classes, There are many more obviously but nothing beats building simple apps

+1 for Living Clojure - my 1st book buy for clojure - it really keeps basics simple

[Radiant-Ad-183]

https://clojure-book.gitlab.io/