Explore the world of lightning fast Clojure apps with asynchronous channels, logic, reactive programming, and more

About This Book

• Discover Clojure's features and advantages and use them in your existing projects
• Explore lesser-known and more advanced features, constructs, and methodologies such as asynchronous channels, actors, logic programming, and reactive programming
• Measure and monitor performance, and understand optimization techniques

Who This Book Is For

If you're looking to learn more about its core libraries and delve into the Clojure language in detail, then this book is ideal for you. Prior knowledge of the Clojure language is required.

What You Will Learn

• Understand tools for the Clojure world and how they relate to Java tools and standards (such as Maven)
• Write simple multicore programs using Clojure's core concepts, such as atoms, agents, and refs
• Get to grips with Clojure's concurrency and state-management primitives in depth
• Analyze latency using the Criterium library
• Avoid reflection and boxing with type hints
• Maximize the impact of parallelization, functional composition, and process transformation by composing reducers and transducers
• Modify and add features to the Clojure language using macros
• 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

In Detail

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.

This learning path aims at unleashing the true potential of the Clojure language so you can use it in your projects. It begins with installing and setting up the Clojure environment before moving on to explore the language in depth. You'll get acquainted with its various features such as functional programming, concurrency, reducers, transducers, core.async and core.logic, and so on with a great level of detail.

Moving on, you'll also learn how to enhance performance using Java interoperability and JVM-specific features from Clojure; you'll even master language features such as asynchronous channels, actors, logic programming, reactive programming, metaprogramming, and so on.

This learning path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:

• Clojure for Java Developers by Eduardo Diaz
• Clojure High Performance Programming, Second Edition by Shantanu Kumar
• Mastering Clojure by Akhil Wali

Style and approach

This is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to start writing Clojure programs, making use of all of its varied features and advantages.

Table of Contents

Module 1: Clojure for Java Developers

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Clojure

Chapter 2: Namespaces, Packages, and Tests

Chapter 3: Interacting with Java

Chapter 4: Collections and Functional Programming

Chapter 5: Multimethods and Protocols

Chapter 6: Concurrency

Chapter 7: Macros in Clojure

Module 2: Clojure High Performance Programming, Second Edition

Chapter 1: Performance by Design

Chapter 2: Clojure Abstractions

Chapter 3: Leaning on Java

Chapter 4: Host Performance

Chapter 5: Concurrency

Chapter 6: Measuring Performance

Chapter 7: Performance Optimization

Chapter 8: Application Performance

Module 3: Mastering Clojure

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

About the Authors

Eduardo Diaz is a developer with a strong background in the Java language. He has a passion for functional programming and new programming paradigms. His work includes full stack development, systems design, and high-volume, real-time data processing. He has worked on every technology-related problem you can imagine, as a consultant solving anything related to Java, UNIX, C (or any other strange problem you might have had). As a developer, he has been working for around 10 years on Java, Python, Scala, and Clojure, in the media, bank, and primarily communications industries. He is currently working at Grupo Expansion, a media company, where he helps design and implement a new content delivery platform aiming to empower content editors and encourage developers to find new ways to use data.

Shantanu Kumar is a software developer living in Bengaluru, India. He works with Concur Technologies as a principal engineer, building a next-generation stack in Clojure. He started learning computer programming when he was at school, and has dabbled in several programming languages and software technologies. Having used Java for a long time, he discovered Clojure early in 2009 and has been a fan of it ever since. When not busy with programming or reading up on technical stuff, he enjoys reading non-fiction and cycling around Bengaluru. Shantanu is an active participant in The Bangalore Clojure Users Group, and contributes to several open source Clojure projects on GitHub. He is also the author of the first edition of the book Clojure High Performance Programming, Packt Publishing.

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.