LJC Book Club Give Away - Clojure Made Simple

Really excited to announce that the LJC Book Club is partnering with developer.press to give away 10 iBook copies of their latest book: Clojure Made Simple - Introduction to Clojure by John Stevenson.

Original post and details here:
http://ljcbookclub.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/clojure-made-simple-ibook-give-away/

Hopefully this will be a regular thing and we will have more books to give away on a regular basis. Not that they aren't really already, the price is $4 which was £2.66 when I last checked! Really great to see books becoming more accessible!

Functional Programming for the Object Orientated Programmer

Having finished our first book (The Well-Grounded Java Developer), the LJC Book Club has now started our new book: Functional Programming for the Object Orientated Programmer.

To keep things consistent, Ged and I will be keeping all the Skimmer's Guides on the LJC Blog from now on. I've drafted the first one and hopefully it will be available soon.

So far I have found the book a little slow, I'm dying to learn it all already! The functional style of coding combined with the old school command line style coding is bringing back strong memories of when I first started coding with Haskell xD

During the course of this book, we will be doing a load of exercises and I will be sharing all my code on GitHub (https://github.com/arkangelofkaos/fp-oo). Hopefully over the course of reading this book the quality of the code I produce will increase as well ;) However I am in dire need of a fully functioning IDE! My goal for next week is to try to get my old ultimate version of IntelliJ 11 fully set up and ready, I need my autocomplete and formatting back :P

In any case, so far the book is great aside from the slow start. I got so sucked into it that I've accidentally read ahead already. My immediate goals are to learn how to do recursion and pattern matching properly in Clojure, can't wait!

Skimmer's Guide - "Chapter 10: Clojure: Safer Programming" of "Well-Grounded Java Developer"

Foreword

Recently I set-up the LJC Book Club (blog here) with Ged Byrne and the first book we chose was "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" by Benjamin Evan and Martijn Verburg.

As a part of the reading schedule, Ged and I are hoping to produce a weekly "Skimmer's Guide". 

This is my first such attempt and hopefully there will be many more to come!




“..Lisp is an acronym for Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses...”

What did we read about?

Week 6 has brought us to the Clojure chapter which focuses on introducing the functional language to Java developers. The topics range from your simple 'Hello World' program all the way to Clojure style concurrency being used to steal all the money from Ben's account!

What stood out?

Arithmetic, equality and other operators (p. 287)

Simple explanation of the Clojure mathematical operators and introduces variadic functions. In-short using a variable number of function parameters - e.g. (+ 1 2 3) // returns 6

Schwartzian transform (p. 290)

Great example which allows you to learn how to read Clojure "inside-out" and really get to grips with core concepts of functional programming.

Multi-thread ATM (starting p. 308)

Fantastic example of whole concise Clojure can be over Java, as well as explaining how to do concurrency in Clojure.

If you read nothing else this week...

Getting started with the REPL (p. 281)

Get started hacking on the "Clojure console" and learn about mutable/immuntable state in Clojure.

Interoperating between Clojure and Java (p. 299)

Learn how to call Java from the "Clojure console" and get under the covers of Clojure on the JVM.