22 books like Professional Clojure

By Jeremy Anderson, Michael Gaare, Justin Holguin , Nick Bailey , Timothy Pratley

Here are 22 books that Professional Clojure fans have personally recommended if you like Professional Clojure. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Clojure Applied: From Practice to Practitioner

Dmitri Sotnikov Author Of Web Development with Clojure: Build Large, Maintainable Web Applications Interactively

From my list on essential Clojure resources.

Why am I passionate about this?

With over a decade of experience in web development using Clojure and active involvement in the Clojure open source community, I have gathered invaluable insights into effective use of the language. I am eager to share some of the experience and knowledge I have acquired with those new to the language.

Dmitri's book list on essential Clojure resources

Dmitri Sotnikov Why did Dmitri love this book?

The Clojure ecosystem presents a multifaceted landscape that can pose a significant challenge for novices, thereby rendering the language itself daunting to approach. However, this comprehensive book aims to alleviate these complexities by providing a guided pathway for readers to construct practical web applications using Clojure.

By following the structured framework within these pages, readers will not only gain a deeper understanding of the language's nuances but also acquire essential proficiency in employing it efficiently. Furthermore, this authoritative resource elucidates numerous best practices, empowering readers to cultivate a skillset that maximizes their effectiveness in utilizing Clojure to its fullest potential.

This book is a great choice for Clojure beginners because it takes the reader through pragmatic examples of using the language, and applying its features effective to solve real-world problems.

By Ben Vandgrift, Alex Miller,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Clojure Applied as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Think in the Clojure way! Once you're familiar with Clojure, take the next step with extended lessons on the best practices and most critical decisions you'll need to make while developing. Learn how to model your domain with data, transform it with pure functions, manage state, spread your work across cores, and structure apps with components. Discover how to use Clojure in the real world, and unlock the speed and power of this beautiful language on the Java Virtual Machine. Clojure Applied gives you the practical, realistic advice and depth of field that's been missing from your development practice. You…


Book cover of Living Clojure: An Introduction and Training Plan for Developers

Dmitri Sotnikov Author Of Web Development with Clojure: Build Large, Maintainable Web Applications Interactively

From my list on essential Clojure resources.

Why am I passionate about this?

With over a decade of experience in web development using Clojure and active involvement in the Clojure open source community, I have gathered invaluable insights into effective use of the language. I am eager to share some of the experience and knowledge I have acquired with those new to the language.

Dmitri's book list on essential Clojure resources

Dmitri Sotnikov Why did Dmitri love this book?

This book is an excellent choice for experienced developers who are looking to learn functional programming style. The book introduces Clojure concepts and guides the reader through a series of problems where these concepts are applied in real-world scenarios making it an essential resource for learning the language.

By Carin Meier,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Living Clojure as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

If you're an experienced programmer looking for a thorough but gentle introduction to Clojure, this is the perfect guide for you. Author Carin Meier not only provides a practical overview of this JVM language and its functional programming concepts, but also includes a complete hands-on training course to help you learn Clojure in a structured way. The first half of the book takes you through Clojure's unique design and lets you try your hand at two Clojure projects, including a web app. The holistic course in second half provides you with critical tools and resources, including ways to plug into…


Book cover of Clojure Cookbook: Recipes for Functional Programming

Dmitri Sotnikov Author Of Web Development with Clojure: Build Large, Maintainable Web Applications Interactively

From my list on essential Clojure resources.

Why am I passionate about this?

With over a decade of experience in web development using Clojure and active involvement in the Clojure open source community, I have gathered invaluable insights into effective use of the language. I am eager to share some of the experience and knowledge I have acquired with those new to the language.

Dmitri's book list on essential Clojure resources

Dmitri Sotnikov Why did Dmitri love this book?

This book contains many practical examples of solving common programming tasks using Clojure, and it's an excellent choice for a practical Clojure reference.

Developers who are new to the functional programming style will find a lot of useful patterns for solving problems using idiomatic Clojure style. The book is an essential reference for Clojure developers.

By Luke VanderHart, Ryan Neufeld,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Clojure Cookbook as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With more than 150 detailed recipes, this cookbook shows experienced Clojure developers how to solve a variety of programming tasks with this JVM language. The solutions cover everything from building dynamic websites and working with databases to network communication, cloud computing, and advanced testing strategies. And more than 60 of the world's best Clojurians contributed recipes. Each recipe includes code that you can use right away, along with a discussion on how and why the solution works, so you can adapt these patterns, approaches, and techniques to situations not specifically covered in this cookbook.
Master built-in primitive and composite data…


Book cover of ClojureScript: Up and Running: Functional Programming for the Web

Dmitri Sotnikov Author Of Web Development with Clojure: Build Large, Maintainable Web Applications Interactively

From my list on essential Clojure resources.

Why am I passionate about this?

With over a decade of experience in web development using Clojure and active involvement in the Clojure open source community, I have gathered invaluable insights into effective use of the language. I am eager to share some of the experience and knowledge I have acquired with those new to the language.

Dmitri's book list on essential Clojure resources

Dmitri Sotnikov Why did Dmitri love this book?

This book introduces developers to ClojureScript which is a dialect of Clojure that targets JavaScript runtimes.

It's a great choice for web developers who are considering building full-stack Clojure applications. The book will help developers learn about the differences between Clojure and ClojureScript, and to make effective use of both language dialects for building applications that span both the front-end and the backend.

By Stuart Sierra, Luke Vanderhart,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked ClojureScript as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Learn how to build complete client-side applications with ClojureScript, the Clojure language variant that compiles to optimized JavaScript. This hands-on introduction shows you how ClojureScript not only has similarities to JavaScript - without the flaws - but also supports the full semantics of its parent language. You'll delve into ClojureScript's immutable data structures, lazy sequences, first-class functions, macros, and support for JavaScript libraries. No previous experience with Clojure or ClojureScript is necessary. If you're familiar with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and the DOM, you'll quickly discover that ClojureScript has the same reach as JavaScript, but with more power.
Start writing ClojureScript…


Book cover of Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks: When Threads Unravel

Enrico Buonanno Author Of Functional Programming in C#

From my list on to learn to think like a functional programmer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a programmer with a desire to constantly learn and improve. I have many years of experience in writing mission-critical software in highly event-driven areas such as FinTech and online auctions. Through interesting and challenging projects, I've always been fascinated by trying to generalize and abstract what it is that makes good code; so things like design patterns and best practices were just up my street. As I expanded this personal research, I found that functional programming provided many interesting techniques, but that many professionals in the industry were unaware of them. This is why I decided to show these techniques and their benefits to a wider audience through my book Functional Programming in C#.

Enrico's book list on to learn to think like a functional programmer

Enrico Buonanno Why did Enrico love this book?

I think it's beyond dispute that concurrency is the most challenging area of programming.

Even fairly simple programs can become dauntingly complex once you introduce concurrency into the picture. For this reason, concurrency is definitely one area where even accomplished programmers should keep honing their skills.

Another difficulty is that there are different sorts of concurrency (parallelism, multi-threading, asynchrony), and different environments (in terms of latency, durability, etc) which all require different solutions.

Paul Butcher's Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks helps you to make sense of this complexity by presenting different programming tasks along with the solution that most effectively tackles each task. It takes you from a demonstration of the use (and problems) of threads and locks - the most widespread, yet also the most low-level and error-prone approach to concurrent programming - to atoms - units that associate a constant identity with a mutable value - to…

By Paul Butcher,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Your software needs to leverage multiple cores, handle thousands of users and terabytes of data, and continue working in the face of both hardware and software failure. Concurrency and parallelism are the keys, and Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks equips you for this new world. See how emerging technologies such as actors and functional programming address issues with traditional threads and locks development. Learn how to exploit the parallelism in your computer's GPU and leverage clusters of machines with MapReduce and Stream Processing. And do it all with the confidence that comes from using tools that help you write…


Book cover of Elm in Action

Enrico Buonanno Author Of Functional Programming in C#

From my list on to learn to think like a functional programmer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a programmer with a desire to constantly learn and improve. I have many years of experience in writing mission-critical software in highly event-driven areas such as FinTech and online auctions. Through interesting and challenging projects, I've always been fascinated by trying to generalize and abstract what it is that makes good code; so things like design patterns and best practices were just up my street. As I expanded this personal research, I found that functional programming provided many interesting techniques, but that many professionals in the industry were unaware of them. This is why I decided to show these techniques and their benefits to a wider audience through my book Functional Programming in C#.

Enrico's book list on to learn to think like a functional programmer

Enrico Buonanno Why did Enrico love this book?

If you're a C# programmer and have read or are interested in my book, there's a good chance you're working on a backend that supports a web application powered with JavaScript (or another language that compiles to JavaScript).

If you're interested in having more functional programming in your life, I recommend you learn Elm, a purely functional language that compiles to JavaScript.

To do this, I recommend Richard Feldman's Elm in Action, a book that takes you from zero to writing a web app in Elm.

The book teaches you everything you need to know to get started with Elm: 1) the syntax—it's a language of the ML family (like Haskell or F#) but its type system is simpler, and generally the language has been designed to be the most approachable functional language out there; 2) the Elm architecture—you write code that works within a framework, so you can write…

By Richard Feldman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Elm in Action as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Elm is more than just a cutting-edge programming language, it's a chance to upgrade the way you think about building web applications. Once you get comfortable with Elm's refreshingly different approach to application development, you'll be working with a clean syntax, dependable libraries, and a delightful compiler that essentially eliminates runtime exceptions. Elm compiles to JavaScript, so your code runs in any browser, and Elm's best-in-class rendering speed will knock your socks off. Let's get started!

Elm in Action teaches you how to build well-designed, highly performant web applications using the Elm language. As you read, you'll follow an application…


Book cover of Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking

Yehonathan Sharvit Author Of Data-Oriented Programming

From my list on become a great developer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.

Yehonathan's book list on become a great developer

Yehonathan Sharvit Why did Yehonathan love this book?

I found Normand’s focus on functional programming techniques incredibly practical and enlightening. Despite its technical content, I found the book accessible and engaging.

I believe this book is essential for anyone looking to tame complexity in their code. It’s a book I revisit when I need to explain the power of functional programming to my colleagues.

By Eric Normand,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Grokking Simplicity as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Distributed across servers, difficult to test, and resistant to modification-modern software is complex. Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. It introduces a unique approach to functional programming that explains why certain features of software are prone to complexity, and teaches you the functional techniques you can use to simplify these systems so that they're easier to test and debug.

Available in PDF (ePub, kindle, and liveBook formats coming soon). about the technologyEven experienced developers struggle with software systems that sprawl across distributed servers and APIs, are filled with…


Book cover of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Yehonathan Sharvit Author Of Data-Oriented Programming

From my list on become a great developer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.

Yehonathan's book list on become a great developer

Yehonathan Sharvit Why did Yehonathan love this book?

This book profoundly changed how I approach functional programming. I found its deep dive into core concepts like recursion, abstraction, and modularity incredibly insightful. The exercises pushed me to think critically and refine my problem-solving process.

Despite being an older book, its content remains relevant and valuable to me.  I consider it the best pragmatic introduction to functional programming.

By Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As others have gone into, this is a great programming book for many reasons, and is a must-read for anyone who is interested in software design. Rather than waste time reaffirming the excellent positive reviews of this book, I wanted to cover something that I have not seen in the reviews: namely that there are multiple publishers for this book (as it is an "open source" book). At the time of writing, there is this McGraw-Hill publication, and, for 40% less, an MIT press edition. While I have not seen the McGraw-Hill version in person to see what quality benefits…


Book cover of Type-Driven Development with Idris

Enrico Buonanno Author Of Functional Programming in C#

From my list on to learn to think like a functional programmer.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a programmer with a desire to constantly learn and improve. I have many years of experience in writing mission-critical software in highly event-driven areas such as FinTech and online auctions. Through interesting and challenging projects, I've always been fascinated by trying to generalize and abstract what it is that makes good code; so things like design patterns and best practices were just up my street. As I expanded this personal research, I found that functional programming provided many interesting techniques, but that many professionals in the industry were unaware of them. This is why I decided to show these techniques and their benefits to a wider audience through my book Functional Programming in C#.

Enrico's book list on to learn to think like a functional programmer

Enrico Buonanno Why did Enrico love this book?

For many years I did not question the validity of the language I was using, focussing instead on becoming good at getting it to do what was needed. It never occurred to me that, say, the type system could be flawed, causing extra work and allowing unnecessary bugs to seep in.

But what if, instead of writing validation code, you could define your types in a way that makes it impossible to create an invalid instance? What if you could define state transitions in such a way that a state machine cannot transition into an invalid state? These are indeed some of the things the Idris language allows.

In his book Type-Driven Development with Idris, Edwin Brady takes you through both the ideas of type-driven development, and how they're enabled in Iris. Iris looks a lot like Haskell, but better. It even has a unique solution for the complex issue…

By Edwin Brady,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Type-Driven Development with Idris as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

DESCRIPTION

Types are often seen as a tool for checking errors, with the

programmer writing a complete program first and using the type

checker to detect errors. And while tests are used to show presence of

errors, they can only find errors that you explicitly test for. In typedriven

development, types become your tools for constructing

programs and, used appropriately, can show the absence of errors. And

you can express precise relationships between data, your assumptions

are explicit and checkable, and you can precisely state and verify

properties. Type-driven development lets users write extensible code,

create simple specifications very early…


Book cover of Python Distilled

Naomi R. Ceder Author Of The Quick Python Book

From my list on to level up your Python skills.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been teaching and writing Python code (and managing others while they write Python code) for over 20 years. After all that time Python is still my tool of choice, and many times Python is the key part of how I explore and think about problems. My experience as a teacher also has prompted me to dig in and look for the simplest way of understanding and explaining the elegant way that Python features fit together. 

Naomi's book list on to level up your Python skills

Naomi R. Ceder Why did Naomi love this book?

Dave is the best teacher of programming and how programming languages (and Python specifically) work that I’ve ever met. He has a knack for making explanations of tough concepts seem clear, and he is very good at focusing on what’s essential to using a coding technique or structure and how to write good code. Like all of Dave’s books, the stuff in here just makes sense.

By David Beazley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Python Distilled as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Expert Insight for Modern Python (3.6+) Development from the Author of Python Essential Reference

The richness of modern Python challenges developers at all levels. How can programmers who are new to Python know where to begin without being overwhelmed? How can experienced Python developers know they're coding in a manner that is clear and effective? How does one make the jump from learning about individual features to thinking in Python at a deeper level? Dave Beazley's new Python Distilled addresses these and many other real-world issues.

Focusing on Python 3.6 and higher, this concise handbook focuses on the essential core…


Book cover of Clojure Applied: From Practice to Practitioner
Book cover of Living Clojure: An Introduction and Training Plan for Developers
Book cover of Clojure Cookbook: Recipes for Functional Programming

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