Any good Clojure tutorials/courses online?

Hi All,

I am new to this Clojure Forum/community, an experienced Java programmer.
At my work we are planning to use Clojure as backend programming language for one of our projects.
It would be great if anyone can help with finding good online tutorials/courses to learn Clojure basics, which includes web development project as well.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Vikas

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Guides on clojure.org and Reference materials are very good.

Eric Normand has a lot of high-quality courses on various aspects of the language and

I also like and recommend books to learn Clojure, e.g.

See also How do I learn the language? on the Clojure website.

Lastly, Clojurians slack is an excellent place to ask questions (including how to learn the language).

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Firstly thanks @jumar for replaying to my post with all the links and materials.

I think “Web Development with Clojure” is exactly what I was looking for.
I am kind of learner who learns from video tutorials/courses. Although Eric Normand video courses looks promising, but its paid and expensive!
I have joined the Clojurians, and the people in the community are amazing.

Cheers,
VIk

About Eric’s courses:

Although Eric Normand video courses looks promising, but its paid and expensive!

He used to offer 40% discount for people from specific countries.
If it’s still expensive to you, maybe you can even get it for free for a limited amount of time if you wrote him an email.

But either case, if you plan to engage in learning Clojure very soon, I think it’s well worth to pay a couple of months.

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There are some super books. My favorite, because it was good reading AND somewhat useful for reference until I got the hang of everything, is “Clojure programming” by Emerick, Carper & Grand… old-school O’Reilly at its best. However, while the core language is still the same as when the book was written, the tools have changed, so you would rely instead on the getting-started page of whatever tool your team has chosen.

Nonetheless, I found a video or two from Eric Normand very helpful. You’re looking over his shoulder while he’s getting stuff done. The perspective greatly complemented the book learning.

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I’d recommend this course:

Clojure - from beginner to advance

You’ll get a general overview of the language and ecosystem culminating in the creation of a db backed blog. Overall I found it informative, and well paced but I’d take the “advanced” part with a grain of salt.

At the time of writing you can pick it up for around $12 USD.

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https://practical.li/ has lots of freely available content on using Clojure (in a practical way)

There are also 100+ hours of live video showing several aspects of Clojure development

The https://kit-clj.github.io/ kit framework is a useful tool to generate the structure of server-side web apps with plenty of examples of how to wire them together

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I am also a beginner learning Clojure. Before Clojure, I worked with Common Lisp for more than a year (Nyxt browser project), I have been using Emacs for 1.5 years (which uses Elisp), and I had a course on college using Racket. So, I have some general Lisp family experience, despite the small experience with Clojure in particular.

I like books with an exercise driven-approach. Hence, I would like to suggest a book called The Clojure Workshop.

If you wanna learn Emacs, check out a book called Mastering Emacs and the System Crafters YouTube channel. Emacs is a powerful tool in general. And, apparently, the best for Clojure development. But, take into account that is a pretty tough endeavor. It will take multiple hours to become minimally comfortable. And multiple months (maybe years) to become an expert! Seems a good time investment, we use editors all the time as programmers.

There is also a book called Living Clojure: An Introduction and Training Plan for Developers which has some exercises on week/days trainning. Clojure for the Brave and True has a small number of exercises on every chapter.

Finally, I am watching Eric Normand courses. They are a good resource. But, except for the first videos on the basic course, they lack exercises. I treat it more like a audio-visual library than a learning path. It is good to look for when you need something in particular - instead of searching on YouTube for instance.

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Someone else mentioned “Clojure for the Brave and True,” and this book is available entirely free online (click any of the chapter titles or the “start reading now” link at top).

I worked my way through the book and did every single exercise and thought it was an excellent introduction. Just my two cents.

It is not web specific however, and does not include web specific stuff. So you could always save this for if you feel you are having trouble learning the language with a web dev specific title.

(If you go this route, the one thing I would skip is his heavy emacs customization code he offers via GitHub link. Personally I just installed/ activated some key packages - clojure mode, cider, paredit, and show paren mode I believe. He also offers links to the more popular IDEs if you don’t want to learn emacs.)

(I’d also strongly recommend doing all the exercises, especially if you’re new to functional programming or lisp. Otherwise it’s too easy to fool yourself into thinking you grasp the concepts. It really solidifies the learning to actually put it into practice.)

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I’m really enjoying the ClojureStream courses from @jacekschae

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