I would like to thank Rich Hickey for creating Clojure and making it available as open source, and for his awesome talk videos. I would also like to thank Alex Miller for arranging so many Clojure talks and for making their videos accessible to all; and Alex Ott, Michael Klishin, and others from the Clojure community for their hard work in making Clojure documentation aggregated and available.

While I was working at the Bangalore office of Runa (now Staples Lab) earlier, several colleagues shared valuable input about Clojure performance. Most notably, Zach Tellman shared his insight about Clojure and JVM performance, Isaac Praveen and Abhijith Gopal shared a great deal of information about Clojure application behavior under load, and Philippe Hanrigou shared his ideas about high performance API design and queue systems. I want to thank all of them.

This book would not have become a reality without the fine people at Packt Publishing. I would like to thank Ashvini Sharma for contacting me and convincing me to take up writing this book, Anish Ramchandani and Amey Sawant for coordinating the writing process, and the Commissioning Editors Meeta Rajani, Llewellyn Rozario, and Priyanka Shah for shaping up this book as I engaged in my debut writing. Technical Editors Jalasha D'costa and Monica John helped me disambiguate and refine the language in this book. I also owe my gratitude to the technical reviewers Jan Borgelin, Mimmo Cosenza, Paul Stadig, and Miki Tebeka – their feedback made the content so much better. Any errors or omissions, however, are only due to me.

Writing this book has been an arduous task. I want to thank my wife Binita for putting up with me while I was immersed far too many days, nights, and weekends into the book. If not for her support, I would not have been able to do justice to this book.