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

Destructuring

Destructuring allows you to remove data elements from their structure or disassemble a structure. It is a technique that improves the readability and conciseness of your code by providing a better tool for a widely used pattern. There are two main ways of destructuring data: sequentially (with vectors) and associatively (with maps).

Imagine that we need to write a function that prints a formatted string given a tuple of coordinates, for example, the tuple [48.9615, 2.4372]. We could write the following function:

(defn print-coords [coords]
  (let [lat (first coords)
        lon (last coords)]
    (println (str "Latitude: " lat " - " "Longitude: " lon))))

This print-coords function takes a tuple of coordinates as a parameter and prints out the coordinates to the console in a nicely formatted string, for example, Latitude: 48.9615Longitude: 2...