Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By : Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo
Book Image

The Clojure Workshop

By: Joseph Fahey, Thomas Haratyk, Scott McCaughie, Yehonathan Sharvit, Konrad Szydlo

Overview of this book

The Clojure Workshop is a step-by-step guide to Clojure and ClojureScript, designed to quickly get you up and running as a confident, knowledgeable developer. Because of the functional nature of the language, Clojure programming is quite different to what many developers will have experienced. As hosted languages, Clojure and ClojureScript can also be daunting for newcomers because of complexities in the tooling and the challenge of interacting with the host platforms. To help you overcome these barriers, this book adopts a practical approach. Every chapter is centered around building something. As you progress through the book, you will progressively develop the 'muscle memory' that will make you a productive Clojure programmer, and help you see the world through the concepts of functional programming. You will also gain familiarity with common idioms and patterns, as well as exposure to some of the most widely used libraries. Unlike many Clojure books, this Workshop will include significant coverage of both Clojure and ClojureScript. This makes it useful no matter your goal or preferred platform, and provides a fresh perspective on the hosted nature of the language. By the end of this book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Clojure and ClojureScript.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
2. Data Types and Immutability

Introduction

Clojure is a hosted language, which means that it runs on top of another language. In the same way that Clojure runs on top of the JVM, ClojureScript runs on top of JavaScript. More precisely, a ClojureScript program is transpiled into a JavaScript program that can run in the browser, on the server side, and in any environment where JavaScript is supported. For example, consider Node.js, an open source JavaScript server environment that allows us to execute JavaScript programs.

In this chapter, we will learn the basics of ClojureScript and how to create a ClojureScript program that runs in the browser. We will build a small frontend application on top of the Reagent framework that connects to an HTTP endpoint and displays User Interface (UI) components that the user can interact with. We will use Hiccup as a markup language for the UI components and discover how to execute JavaScript code from ClojureScript.

We will build an application using Figwheel, which supports...