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

Dealing with collections of data is one of the most common and powerful parts of programming. Whether they are called lists, arrays, or vectors, sequential collections are at the heart of almost every program. Every programming language provides tools for creating, accessing, and modifying collections, and, often, what you've learned in one language will apply to the others. Clojure is different, however. We are accustomed to setting a variable and then controlling some other part of the system by changing the value of that variable.

This is what happens in a for loop in most procedural languages. Say that we have an iterator, i, that we increment by calling i++. Changing the value of the iterator controls the flow of the loop. By executing i = i + 3, we can make the loop skip two iterations. The value of i is like a remote control for the loop. In case we increment the iterator by three, what happens if we are just one item away from the end of the array we are...