Clojure for the Brave and True

This book is also available for free at braveclojure.com.

Foreword

The first paragraph hooked me.

Introduction

Deep in your innermost being, you’ve always known you were destined to learn Clojure. Every time you held your keyboard aloft, crying out in anguish over an incomprehensible class hierarchy; every time you lay awake at night, disturbing your loved ones with sobs over a mutation-induced heisenbug; every time a race condition caused you to pull out more of your ever-dwindling hair, some secret part of you has known that there has to be a better way.

Wow. I did not know I felt this way, but after reading this I can not get over that feeling.

The Forest of Tooling

I need to make an effort to not get suck here. I have a habit of playing with tooling and turning all the dials. Much of that tweaking will probably be better after I have some idea of pain points.

The Mountain of Language

Looking forward to my first expose to any Lisp. Long live the parentheses!

The Cave of Artifacts

I wonder if my brief experience with Java and the JVM will be any help here.

The Cloud Castle of Mindset

Really looking forward to this section. Being able to apply Clojure correctly to the problems I am trying to solve.

Chapter 1

Clojure now ships with a native cli, clj. Question: How does this compare to the book’s (and most other tutorials) recommendation of Leiningen?

Chapter 2

I am having a hard time deciding if I should just bite the bullet and learn vanilla emacs. I’ve used (neo)vim for so long that I do not even have to think about what I want to do. That muscle memory is hard to defeat. I tried spacemacs and felt it was a bit much, although I did really like the leader mnemonics. Next I tried just evil which is nice, and where I am now. I feel like not using emacs bindings as first class may cause more pain down the line.