Clojure in Action is a hands-on tutorial for the working programmer who has written code in a language like Java or Ruby, but has no prior experience with Lisp. It teaches Clojure from the basics to advanced topics using practical, real-world application examples. Blow through the theory and dive into practical matters like unit-testing and environment set-up, all the way through building a scalable web-application using domain-specific languages, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ.

About the Technology

Clojure is a modern Lisp for the JVM, and it has the strengths you'd expect: first-class functions, macros, support for functional programming, and a Lisp-like, clean programming style.

About this Book

Clojure in Action is a practical guide focused on applying Clojure to practical programming challenges. You'll start with a language tutorial written for readers who already know OOP. Then, you'll dive into the use cases where Clojure really shines: state management, safe concurrency and multicore programming, first-class code generation, and Java interop. In each chapter, you'll first explore the unique characteristics of a problem area and then discover how to tackle them using Clojure. Along the way, you'll explore practical matters like architecture, unit testing, and set-up as you build a scalable web application that includes custom DSLs, Hadoop, HBase, and RabbitMQ.

This book assumes you're familiar with an OO language like Java, C#, or C++ but requires no background in Lisp or Clojure itself.

What's Inside

• A fast-paced Clojure tutorial
• Creating web services with Clojure
• Scaling through messaging
• Creating DSLs with Clojure's macro system
• Test-driven development with Clojure
• Distributed programming with Clojure, and more

About the Author

Amit Rathore is a VP of Engineering with a decade of experience building highly performant, data-heavy web applications.

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING

“The Clojure language introduces a variety of new and different ways of handling state in concurrent applications, enough that trying to decide which to use under what circumstances can be a difficult choice to understand ... it's the first few sections of this chapter - explaining the problems with state, identity, time & values - that make [Clojure in Action] stand out. As with a lot of the rest of the book, if you understand the problem first then the solution doesn't seem contrived when it is presented, and this is where the book, as a whole, scores in its approach.”
—Paul Umbers, Dzone