Show HN: Clojure for the Brave and True – now free online | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Clojure for the Brave and True – now free online

braveclojure.com

224 pointsnonrecursive30 comments

I know the author personally, having worked with him for some time before he left. Brilliant guy. He pretty much brought Clojure into our tech stack :)

What was it before ? plain old Java or a totally different infrastructure ?

We mostly had a ruby stack. It worked for most stuff albeit being slow. We stayed away from java until clojure came in.

Also starting with elixir - taking inspiration from functional clojure for networking stuff.

One of the best and most enjoyable ways to get started with Clojure, very well done. The part on setting up emacs was hugely helpful for a VI guy for me who's mucked around with other Lisp editor plugins.

How do you feel about developing Clojure in Emacs, as a Vi guy?

I'm also more at home in Vi, but I ended up going with Cursive when I began learning Clojure (and I highly recommend it), but I've always been curious about the Emacs option.

I don't use it everyday, as Clojure is just a side hobby for me. I had tried LightTable and another dedicated lisp editor but at the end I just embraced Emacs instead of fighting it. I'm still a novice, and I struggle between a cheat sheet, but I figure it's such a rich environment for Lisp that I wouldn't be limited by it as I grew. So my philosophy has been, when in Lisp land, do as the Lisp people do...

That said a friend of mine recommended some promising vi plugins which look quite good.

Try spacemacs. https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/

It's an emacs configuration meant to be a hybrid of the best in emacs and vim. I'm a vim user of several years, and am just beginning to do some clojure development of my own, so I recently made the switch.

There's definitely a learning curve, but it's much, much less involved then learning either emacs or vim on their own. And you get to keep the vim editing style.

A couple of things to get used to:

- Space for the leader (it's actually great).

- Escape mostly stops things, but not always. Ctrl-g is a safer option.

- q closes many popup windows.

- Using lisp to do everything in the config file (.spacemacs)

The docs are a good place to start. Also C-h will bring up an extensive help menu.

You'll want to add the clojure layer to your .spacemacs, as one of the dotspacemacs-configuration-layers.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it

I agree. IMO the worst thing "beginner"-level programming books do is let the user figure out a good workflow and environment themselves.

That said, I prefer vim with vim-fireplace and paredit-like plugins.

I bought the pre-release. I hope it starts shipping!~ What a great book. Got me hooked on Clojure. I wish he made a companion book for more advanced use cases. I.e. advanced workflows, testing, project layout etc..

I plan on creating more content :) I wrote a blog post with a couple more details (http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/programming/brave-and-ne..., fourth paragraph). But yes, I want to cover testing, web development, and more. Right now I'm working on an in-depth explanation of reducers.

edit: also, clojure applied is a good book for what you're talking about

I bought the book in the prerelease form after reading most of it online because it was so great! I found it better structured than "Joy of Clojure". Definitely a work of love.

An aside, I was a former Raleigh native, and was surprised to see such a Clojure pocket in the area. Made me wish I was still around!

Thanks for publishing this gratis!

I've been following along for some months, but put off ordering it because I bought Fogus and Hauser instead.

Now there's a deadline on the 30% discount. I'll make a point this week to refer to "Brave and True" as much as possible.

Reporting back to say the print version is infinitely better than the ePub and Web versions.

Thanks again, it's a fun and easy reference work!

I love when authors make their work available online for free. I usually go through a couple chapters and if I like the book I buy a print copy to support the author (and because I like having the actual book anyway, call me old-fashion)

I used this book to get started with Clojure, and I can't imagine learning Clojure any other way. I still refer to it, most recently for multimethods. I used to search the website for updates before they were officially released (like core.async, iirc). Vividly and clearly written, and very funny.

I've been looking forward to this update for it seems like months. Clojure for the brave and true helped me understand core.async, can't wait to go through and read it again

Hey, this is the book that got me to try clojure out.

I'm curious though what do peoples windows clojure workflows look like, as most tutorials I'm seeing are in mac or *nix

Looks great, bookmarked for later reading.

Can you give us some insights in how successful is the business model of releasing a book free to read and paid at the same time ?

I've seen this trend before and I was always wondered if the authors are satisfied with how much money they get this way.

Land of Lisp is another great book... not Clojure per se but an excellent Clojure primer. Includes cartoons, too, which I like.

Am I the only one trying to order it and facing the problem that there is no way to select shipping method at checkout?

Hi dudul, if you wouldn't mind shooting an email about the error to info@nostarch.com, we should be able to help you out!

Thanks.

It eventually worked. Not sure what happened, but after a couple tries I was able to checkout with the shipping option. Thanks, can't wait to receive the book!

Interestingly enough, the page crashes my firefox 100% of the time (linux / firefox 41) but works fine in chrome

Just bought the e-book. Really fun read!

Gonna go over it this weekend ^^ Good job!

I'm pretty bummed that this submission is in HN purgatory for some reason, but it's really great to read these nice comments! I'm glad y'all have found the book useful and enjoyable :)

> in HN purgatory for some reason

It set off the voting ring detector.

We'll reduce the penalty, since the post is probably of interest to the community.

Edit: we also put "Show HN" in the title, since it's your book, it's available to read, and it's a major piece of work.

Thank you for the explanation and penalty reduction, you've made my day! I blame overzealous coworkers.

This was my first Clojure book and it's quite fantastic for a beginner with no prior Clojure or functional experience.

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