Review of Clojure Applied
A while back, Clojure community czar and all around good guy Alex Miller asked me to review a beta version of his nearly complete book Clojure Applied, co-authored with Ben Vandgrift. This was great news for me because I was planning on buying it, but this way I would get it for free. Delighted, I downloaded my free copy, added a "review book" item to my todo list, then merrily ignored it until a couple weeks ago when I saw Alex in person.
"Sorry I haven't gotten around to reviewing your book. I'm super excited about it!" I gushed at him guiltily. "What's the final release date?" Very politely, he responded, "It's already released." It turns out, the resulting dose of healthy embarrassment was all I needed to actually get off my ass and read and review the book!
And I am glad I did, because it's a good one. Clojure Applied is aimed at people who know Clojure basics and want to learn how to write idiomatic code and create production applications, and if this describes you, then you should get it. In case you need more convincing, the rest of this post goes on about how good the book is.
What I like most about Clojure Applied is that it's concise and fast-paced. It doesn't hold your hand, blathering on about basic details that you learned months ago. At the same time, it's very approachable, using straightforward and brisk language. It even has a few fun moments (two words: spaghetti tacos). To use a cliche that offends my vegetarian sensibilities, it's all meat and no filler, which is perfect for programmers who are... uh... hungry for knowledge.
The most valuable parts of the book are the sections on building a
system and testing. Decomposing a your program into a system of
interacting components that manage their own state isn't a topic
covered by beginner books, and it's very helpful. It's easy to write
programs whose architectures go against Clojure's grain of functional
programming, immutability, and state management, but Clojure Applied
shows you how to do it right. On the testing front, Clojure Applied
is nice because it covers some of the latest additions to the testing
ecosystem, like test.check.
Another nice aspect of the book is that it introduces you to a
cornucopia of useful standard library and Java functions and
constructs, like the juxt function, the reduced function,
persistent queues, thread pools with the executor service, etc etc
etc.
All in all, it's a good book. If you're looking for a good second book on Clojure, then Clojure Applied is an excellent choice!