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

Higher-Order Programming

Higher-order programming means that programs, and specifically functions, can operate on other programs or functions, as opposed to first-order programming, where functions operate on data elements such as strings, numbers, and data structures. In practice, it means that a function can take some programming logic as a parameter (another function) and/or return some programming logic to be eventually executed. It is a powerful feature that allows us to compose single, modular units of logic in our programs to reduce duplication and promote the reusability of code.

Writing simpler functions increases their modularity. We want to create simple units of functionality that can be used as small bricks to build our programs with. Writing pure functions reduces the complexity of those bricks, and allows us to craft better, sturdier programs. Pure functions are functions that don't alter the state of our program – they produce no side effects; a pure...