Excellent Free Books to Learn about Clojure

Last Updated on September 21, 2023

5. A Brief Beginner’s Guide To Clojure by John Gabriele

The purpose of A Brief Beginner’s Guide To Clojure is to provide new users with a 1000-meter view of Clojure and its ecosystem, including how to quickly get up and running.

Chapters cover how to install Clojure, the development environment, the language, standalone scripts and more.

This guide concerns the original, Java-based Clojure implementation.

Look elsewhere for a Clojure language tutorial; there are a number of good ones available elsewhere. See the end of this page.

Read the guide at http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/clojure/brief-beginners-guide/.

6. Clojure in Small Pieces by many authors. Edited by Timothy Daly

Clojure in Small Pieces aims to enable anyone to study and contribute their understanding of portions of Clojure.

The book weighs in at a hefty 1,801 pages. A substantial part of the book is a Java code dump. The book includes From The Ground Up and Clojure from the ground up: basic types.

There’s a PDF copy of the book available from this GitHub repository.

7. Clojure Programming by Wikibooks

Clojure Programming aims to help readers maximize the benefits of Clojure. It’s not designed to replace the official documentation.

There’s a Getting Started section which helps you download and install Clojure, as well as setting up editors. The book then move on to Clojure language basics such as supported datatypes, “mutability” or state in Clojure, functional programming and the concurrency features.

Clojure Programming then moves on to a series of tutorials and tips. There’s also a cookbook with various Clojure examples such as using JDBC, communicating with Excel, genclass and finalize.

Read the open source book at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Clojure_Programming.

8. ClojureScript Unraveled by Andrey Antukh & Alejandro Gómez

This books aims to serve as:

• A comprehensive introduction to the ClojureScript language and its idiomatic usage, assuming no previous experience with Clojure or functional programming;
• a detailed guide of the ClojureScript compiler and the tooling around it; and
• a mixed bag of topics that are useful in day-to-day ClojureScript programming.

The book is a work-in-progress.

Read the book at https://funcool.github.io/clojurescript-unraveled/.

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There’s lots of good Clojure articles which will help you get up to speed. Here’s a taster:

• Clojure – Functional Programming for the JVM is an incredibly detailed walkthrough. The article is considered the finest Clojure tutorial to read on the net.
• Learn Clojure in y minutes provides a whirlwind tour of the Clojure language.
• Clojure Distilled focuses understanding the core concepts and how they can be combined to solve problems the functional way.
• Clojure Koans are exercises meant to initiate you to the mysteries of the Clojure language.
• ClojureScript Koans walks you along the path of enlightenment to learning ClojureScript.
• Modern ClojureScript is a series of tutorials that guide you in creating and running ClojureScript (CLJS) projects.
• The Clojure Style Guide recommends best practices so that real-world Clojure programmers can write code that can be maintained by other real-world Clojure programmers.
• Data Sorcery with Clojure focus on statistical programming in the Clojure language using Incanter.

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Clojure Cookbook and more books
Page 2 – A Brief Beginner’s Guide To Clojure and more books

All books in this series: