Mastering Clojure

Book excerpt: Understand the philosophy of the Clojure language and dive into its inner workings to unlock its advanced features, methodologies, and constructs About This Book Learn to handle data using sequences, reducers, and transducers in Clojure Explore the lesser known and more advanced features, constructs, and methodologies of the Clojure language and its ecosystem, such as asynchronous channels, actors, logic programming, and reactive programming Sharpen your Clojure skills through illustrative and comprehensive examples Who This Book Is For If you're looking to learn more about the core libraries and dive deep into the Clojure language, then this book is ideal for you. Prior knowledge of the Clojure language is required. What You Will Learn Maximize the impact of parallelization, functional composition, and process transformation by composing reducers and transducers Process and manipulate data using sequences, reducers, and transducers in Clojure Modify and add features to the Clojure language using macros Explore the features of category theory and custom data sources for logic programming in Clojure Orchestrate parallelism and concurrency using built-in primitives as well as community libraries in Clojure Handle data with asynchronous and reactive programming methodologies and leverage it using the core.async library 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. Mastering Clojure gives you an insight into the nitty-gritty details and more advanced features of the Clojure programming language to create more scalable, maintainable, and elegant applications. You'll start off by learning the details of sequences, concurrency primitives, and macros. Packed with a lot of examples, you'll get a walkthrough on orchestrating concurrency and parallelism, which will help you understand Clojure reducers, and we'll walk through composing transducers so you know about functional composition and process transformation inside out. We also explain how reducers and transducers can be used to handle data in a more performant manner. Later on, we describe how Clojure also supports other programming paradigms such as pure functional programming and logic programming. Furthermore, you'll level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure's powerful macro system. Parallel, asynchronous, and reactive programming techniques are also described in detail. Lastly, we'll show you how to test and troubleshoot your code to speed up your development cycles and allow you to deploy the code faster. Style and approach This is an easy-to-follow project-based guide that throws you directly into the excitement of Clojure code. Mastering Clojure is for anyone who is interested in expanding their knowledge of language features and advanced functional programming.