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

Summary

Lazy sequences and recursion can be rather challenging. By now, you should know how to safely consume lazy sequences, how to produce them, and how to use them to build tree structures from linear data sources, all without blowing the stack of your runtime.

As we've said before, writing functions to produce your own recursion-based lazy sequences should be something that you reach for only when all the other options won't work. Start with map and filter. If that's not enough, try reduce. Maybe the other forms of recursion will work. If none of those solve your problem, you have lazy sequences, an extremely powerful and efficient tool.

Lazy sequences and recursion always make us think. Being able to write your own lazy sequences will also make you a more enlightened consumer of lazy sequences. In Clojure, this is very valuable because lazy sequences are everywhere. Techniques like the ones we've explored here can also help you start thinking about new...