Ask HN: How to pick up Clojure for web dev? (coming from RoR background) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to pick up Clojure for web dev? (coming from RoR background)

13 pointsconqrr12 comments

Whats the equivalent of Mhartl's tutorial for clojure?

Before getting into web dev with Clojure, I recommend reading and doing the exercises from Clojure for the Brave and True to learn the language itself. It is one of the most engaging technical books I have come across in some time. http://www.braveclojure.com/

After that, I would go to the clojure docs to get started with web dev in clojure: http://clojure-doc.org/articles/tutorials/basic_web_developm... The luminus framework has a good tutorial to get started as well: http://www.luminusweb.net/docs

Caveat: I do not code clojure as part of my day job.

Looking at ToC, the odd thing about Clojure for the Brave and True is that the very last chapter is:

Chapter 13: Creating and Extending Abstractions with Multimethods, Protocols, and Records

... This chapter serves as an introduction to the world of creating and implementing your own abstractions.

Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce tools for creating your abstractions at least in the first part of the book?

No because the topics in that chapter are advanced.

Multimethods - maybe, but I think Records should be introduced much earlier, and probably Protocols as well.

Creating abstractions shouldn't be the most advanced topic in the language.

EDIT: One interesting observation (from the outsider's perspective) - As I see, Clojure encourages use of primitive/language-provided data structures such as maps, lists, etc.. instead of creating your own abstractions and "inventing languages" (this is mentioned in a negative context, in Clojure docs). This is radically different approach compared to e.g. SICP, where creating many mini languages is actually encouraged. I personally find Clojure approach messy and unstructured (Also browsing a code in the wild). Anyway, as I can tell, Clojure has enough support to create well structured abstractions.

There's a really good step-by-step introduction to Clojure here: https://aphyr.com/tags/Clojure-from-the-ground-up. From there, you could check out Ring (https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring) which is a Clojure based web application library inspired by RoR/Python WSGI.

Yeah, Ring is where it's at.

There really isn't an equivalent to Mhartl's tutorial for clojure, mostly because there aren't really web frameworks in Clojure. I went from Rails to Clojure a few years back, it was a rough transition because I was used to having a framework do everything for me and in Clojure you have to pick your own libraries and compose them.

I will be starting on a tutorial project soon for my employers, developing an API and frontend client in Clojure with compojure-api for backend, and ClojureScript + reagent for the front-end, with possible fun diversions into Raspberry Pi support and even mobile apps if I can puzzle my way through the still early React Native support for ClojureScript.

In the meantime, for the basics, I started with the Koans. http://clojurekoans.com/ I found them a largely excellent way to get up to speed with the language by doing some actual coding.

There's a really good book:

https://pragprog.com/book/dswdcloj/web-development-with-cloj...

It goes over most of the things you would want to know. Plus, yeah, Luminus.

You could also try something like AppShare made by someone with a Ruby On Rails background:

https://github.com/zubairq/AppShare#the-long-story-of-appsha...

You might try looking at this other thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10959523

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