Apprenticeship! Clojure!

January 14, 2013

Last week was my first full week as a resident apprentice at 8th Light, and boy was it productive.

I managed to grind my way through the Clojure Koans, learn how to use Leiningen/Speclj and built my first Clojure application–a simple implementation of tic tac toe.

By far the most challenging part of last week was finding the right documentation for whatever I was working on. After asking around and doing quite a bit of digging through other blogs and the web, I managed to accumulate a list of useful resources for Clojure beginners. Enjoy!

Helpful Docs for Clojure Beginners

• Clojure Cheat Sheet - Wonderful at-a-glance cheat-sheet for Clojure. I always had this page open in a tab!
• Clojure API Index - Lists all Clojure functions in one spot, alphabetically. I found this less useful than the cheat sheet, as it doesn't separate functions meaningfully.
• The Blackstag Blog: Guide to Programming in Clojure for Beginners - Great intro read and tutorial for those completely new to Clojure.
• Casting SPELs with Clojure - This was an ENORMOUS help for me in the first few days of learning Clojure. The illustrations are fun and made it easier for me to initially wrap my head around some concepts.
• Mocking Input in Clojure - Mike Ebert, a fellow apprentice, wrote an awesome article about mocking input (specifically re-binding functions using with-redefs and with-in-str) and made testing much, much easier.