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

map and filter

The map and filter functions are a key part of a much larger group of functions for dealing with sequences. Of that group, map is certainly the one you will use the most, and filter is a close second. Their role is to modify sequences.

They accept one or more sequences as input, and return a sequence: sequence in, sequence out:

Figure 4.1: A schematic diagram of map and filter working together

In the preceding diagram, we can see map and filter working together, where filter eliminates items from the original list while map changes them.

The first question to ask when solving a problem involving collections is: "Do I want to obtain a list of values, or a single value?" If the answer is a list, then map, filter, or similar functions are what you need. If you need some other kind of value, the solution is probably a reduction of some kind, which we will discuss in the next chapter. But even then, as you break the problem down...