Mastering Clojure

Key Features

• Learn to handle data using sequences, reducers, and transducers in Clojure
• Explore the lesser known and more advanced features, constructs, and methodologies of the Clojure language and its ecosystem, such as asynchronous channels, actors, logic programming, and reactive programming
• Sharpen your Clojure skills through illustrative and comprehensive examples

Book Description

Clojure is a general-purpose language from the Lisp family with an emphasis on functional programming. It has some interesting concepts and features such as immutability, gradual typing, thread-safe concurrency primitives, and macro-based metaprogramming, which makes it a great choice to create modern, performant, and scalable applications.

Mastering Clojure gives you an insight into the nitty-gritty details and more advanced features of the Clojure programming language to create more scalable, maintainable, and elegant applications. You’ll start off by learning the details of sequences, concurrency primitives, and macros. Packed with a lot of examples, you’ll get a walkthrough on orchestrating concurrency and parallelism, which will help you understand Clojure reducers, and we’ll walk through composing transducers so you know about functional composition and process transformation inside out. We also explain how reducers and transducers can be used to handle data in a more performant manner.

Later on, we describe how Clojure also supports other programming paradigms such as pure functional programming and logic programming. Furthermore, you’ll level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure’s powerful macro system. Parallel, asynchronous, and reactive programming techniques are also described in detail.

Lastly, we’ll show you how to test and troubleshoot your code to speed up your development cycles and allow you to deploy the code faster.

What you will learn

• Maximize the impact of parallelization, functional composition, and process transformation by composing reducers and transducers
• Process and manipulate data using sequences, reducers, and transducers in Clojure
• Modify and add features to the Clojure language using macros
• Explore the features of category theory and custom data sources for logic programming in Clojure
• Orchestrate parallelism and concurrency using built-in primitives as well as community libraries in Clojure
• Handle data with asynchronous and reactive programming methodologies and leverage it using the core.async library
• Test your code with unit tests, specs, and type checks to write testable code
• Troubleshoot and style your Clojure code to make it more maintainable

About the Author

Akhil Wali is a software developer. He has been writing code as a hobbyist since 1997 and professionally since 2010. He completed his post graduation from Santa Clara University in 2010, and he graduated from Visvesvaraya Technological University in 2008. His areas of work include business intelligence systems, ERP systems, search engines, and document collaboration tools. He mostly works with Clojure, JavaScript, and C#. Apart from computers, his interests include soccer, guitar solos, and finding out more about the universe.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Working with Sequences and Patterns
Chapter 2. Orchestrating Concurrency and Parallelism
Chapter 3. Parallelization Using Reducers
Chapter 4. Metaprogramming with Macros
Chapter 5. Composing Transducers
Chapter 6. Exploring Category Theory
Chapter 7. Programming with Logic
Chapter 8. Leveraging Asynchronous Tasks
Chapter 9. Reactive Programming
Chapter 10. Testing Your Code
Chapter 11. Troubleshooting and Best Practices