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

Working with External Libraries

Libraries are packaged programs that are ready to be used in other projects. External libraries are libraries that come from other developers. In Clojure, examples of such libraries include Ring, an HTTP library; clojure.java-time, a library for time and date manipulation; and hiccup, a library for writing HTML code using Clojure-style syntax.

Most projects will require developers to use existing code packaged as libraries. This is a good thing. We do not want to write code over and over again if the problem at hand has been already solved and someone has created a library for it that we can use.

In this section, we will use the clojure.Java-time library to display the current time.

Exercise 8.11: Using an External Library in a Leiningen Project

The aim of this exercise is to show you how to add a library to a Leiningen project and demonstrate how this library is used in code:

  1. The first thing to do is add a dependency to the time...