Scoping the audience and the need for a Clojure book for beginners

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I think it will be good to study existing books and investigate why don’t meet the goal, why and what you can add to make

For beginner-level books there are (at least):

  • Programming Clojure
  • Getting Clojure
  • Living Clojure
  • Clojure for the Brave and True
  • Clojure in Action
  • Clojure Programming
  • (maybe) Functional Programming Patterns in Scala and Clojure
  • and Learning ClojureScript (more focused on ClojureScript, some tools and libraries)

I’m not aware of a book teaching programming to complete novices using Clojure (as @didibus mentioned), but for more specialized domains there are some examples :

  • Learn data science with Clojure (we have Clojure for Data Science)
  • Learn web development with Clojure (we have Web Development with Clojure)
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I think that’s what @Yogthos tries to do with his Web Development with Clojure (recently published the 3rd edition).

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Glad to hear it helped! I’ve learned a lot from that book myself.

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The primary challenge I have faced is that it is rare to find a book or guide/tutorial that has steps and instructions that all work and which illustrate a complete, non-trivial use case.

  • Tools and libraries are frequently being improved or replaced with newer ones
  • Code snippets demonstrating one library sometimes do not also illustrate how to integrate that into other projects
  • Some examples depend on lein, some boot, and now some deps
  • Some libraries haven’t seen any Git commits in years; sometimes it’s because the library is perfect and needs no improvement, but other times it’s because the community moved on to a different library
  • Many documentation, books, guides, and examples don’t get updated often enough to match reality, so instructions don’t always work (and troubleshooting those can vary from easy to ???)

For these reasons, it’s great to find that perfect moment when someone has written a current, rich guide. And it seems that this Web Development with Clojure 3rd ed is what I’ve been looking for.

The Luminus website has a prominently displayed link to that book, 2nd edition, and clicking that link takes you to the pragprog.com page for the book (which is out of print, and out of date anyway). But oddly enough, nowhere on the page for 2nd edition do they mention that 3rd ed is in beta!

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