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

Using Java in Clojure

Any code written by a developer needs to be converted to code that is understood by a machine. An interpreter uses code from a developer and compiles it into machine code. Each operating system is different, hence the need for platform-specific compilers and interpreters. One of the reasons why Java is so successful is that it provides the JVM, which takes human-understandable code and converts it into machine code. Developers are not usually interested in the JVM. They can focus on writing code in Java without interacting with the underlying operating system. This job is done by the JVM.

Clojure is a hosted language. It means that it uses the JVM instead of creating a new runtime environment. Clojure cleverly reuses facilities provided by the JVM. This is a very powerful approach. Things such as garbage collection, threading, concurrency, IO operations (all of which will be explained in the following paragraphs) are JVM battle-tested technologies that Clojure...