I know the author personally, having worked with him for some time before he left. Brilliant guy. He pretty much brought Clojure into our tech stack :)
One of the best and most enjoyable ways to get started with Clojure, very well done. The part on setting up emacs was hugely helpful for a VI guy for me who's mucked around with other Lisp editor plugins.
How do you feel about developing Clojure in Emacs, as a Vi guy?
I'm also more at home in Vi, but I ended up going with Cursive when I began learning Clojure (and I highly recommend it), but I've always been curious about the Emacs option.
It's an emacs configuration meant to be a hybrid of the best in emacs and vim. I'm a vim user of several years, and am just beginning to do some clojure development of my own, so I recently made the switch.
There's definitely a learning curve, but it's much, much less involved then learning either emacs or vim on their own. And you get to keep the vim editing style.
A couple of things to get used to:
- Space for the leader (it's actually great).
- Escape mostly stops things, but not always. Ctrl-g is a safer option.
- q closes many popup windows.
- Using lisp to do everything in the config file (.spacemacs)
The docs are a good place to start. Also C-h will bring up an extensive help menu.
You'll want to add the clojure layer to your .spacemacs, as one of the dotspacemacs-configuration-layers.
I don't use it everyday, as Clojure is just a side hobby for me. I had tried LightTable and another dedicated lisp editor but at the end I just embraced Emacs instead of fighting it. I'm still a novice, and I struggle between a cheat sheet, but I figure it's such a rich environment for Lisp that I wouldn't be limited by it as I grew. So my philosophy has been, when in Lisp land, do as the Lisp people do...
That said a friend of mine recommended some promising vi plugins which look quite good.
I bought the pre-release. I hope it starts shipping!~
What a great book. Got me hooked on Clojure.
I wish he made a companion book for more advanced use cases.
I.e. advanced workflows, testing, project layout etc..
I plan on creating more content :) I wrote a blog post with a couple more details (http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/brave-and-ne..., fourth paragraph). But yes, I want to cover testing, web development, and more. Right now I'm working on an in-depth explanation of reducers.
edit: also, clojure applied is a good book for what you're talking about
I bought the book in the prerelease form after reading most of it online because it was so great! I found it better structured than "Joy of Clojure". Definitely a work of love.
An aside, I was a former Raleigh native, and was surprised to see such a Clojure pocket in the area. Made me wish I was still around!
I love when authors make their work available online for free. I usually go through a couple chapters and if I like the book I buy a print copy to support the author (and because I like having the actual book anyway, call me old-fashion)
I used this book to get started with Clojure, and I can't imagine learning Clojure any other way. I still refer to it, most recently for multimethods. I used to search the website for updates before they were officially released (like core.async, iirc). Vividly and clearly written, and very funny.
I've been looking forward to this update for it seems like months. Clojure for the brave and true helped me understand core.async, can't wait to go through and read it again
It eventually worked. Not sure what happened, but after a couple tries I was able to checkout with the shipping option. Thanks, can't wait to receive the book!
I'm pretty bummed that this submission is in HN purgatory for some reason, but it's really great to read these nice comments! I'm glad y'all have found the book useful and enjoyable :)