Books about Clojure and ClojureScript

This guide covers:

  • Books about Clojure
  • Books about ClojureScript

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Overview

As of September 2014, Clojure has over a dozen books published (or available for preview) about it, plus two about ClojureScript. This guide lists some of them in reverse chronological order and intended to provide a very brief overview of each. It is by no means comprehensive and may be quite opinionated. The goal is to identify books that are more useful to newcomers than others and recommend books that cover recent releases of Clojure (1.3+).

Books About Clojure

Note: books are listed in reverse chronological order.

Getting Clojure: Build Your Functional Skills One Idea at a Time

By Russ Olsen

Notes

An accessible introduction to Clojure that focuses on the ideas behind the language as well as the practical details of writing code.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure: Microservices with Clojure

By Anuj Kumar

Notes

The common patterns and practices of the microservice architecture and their application using the Clojure programming language.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure: High Performance JVM Programming

By Eduardo Díaz, Shantanu Kumar, Akhil Wali

Notes

Explore the world of lightning fast Clojure apps with asynchronous channels, logic, reactive programming and more.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure Standard Library (An Annotated Guide)

By Renzo Borgatti

Notes

The book illustrates the functions and macros contained in the Clojure standard library adding examples and implementation notes. Currently in early access.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure Programming Cookbook

By Makoto Hashimoto, Nicolas Modrzyk

Notes

Handle every problem you come across in the world of Clojure programming with this expert collection of recipes

Where You Can Buy It

Mastering Clojure

By Akhil Wali

Notes

Understand the philosophy of the Clojure language and dive into its inner workings to unlock its advanced features, methodologies, and constructs

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure for Java Developers

By Eduardo Díaz

Notes

Discover Clojure’s features and advantages and use them in your existing projects

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure for Finance

By Timothy Washington

Notes

A practical step-by-step tutorial that provides a basic overview of the concepts but focuses on providing the skills required to analyze data.

Where You Can Buy It

Mastering Clojure Macros

By Colin Jones.

Notes

A book that walks you step-by-step from the basic building blocks of macros to creating new language features.

Where You Can Buy It

The Joy of Clojure, 2nd Edition

By Michael Fogus and Chris Houser.

Notes

Updated for Clojure 1.6 with new content.

Where You Can Buy It

Mastering Clojure Data Analysis

By Eric Rochester.

Notes

This book presents a more in-depth look into Data Analysis than the author's other book Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook. Several topics (Network Analysis, GIS Analysis, Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, etc) are examined with examples using Clojure to process real-world data.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure for Machine Learning

By Akhil Wali.

Notes

An introduction to machine learning problems, techniques and algorithms and how they can be applied against real-world problems using Clojure.

Where You Can Buy It

Web Development with Clojure: Build Bulletproof Web Apps with Less Code

By Dmitri Sotnikov.

Notes

This book shows you how to leverage Clojure web-development libraries to create web applications using an example-based approach.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure High Performance Programming

By Shantanu Kumar.

Notes

A book on all things performant code in Clojure and on the JVM: profiling, benchmarking, data structures, laziness impact, and more.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure For The Brave and True

By Daniel Higginbotham.

Notes

A book for beginners. Covers the language and key parts of the ecosystem.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure Cookbook

By Luke VanderHart, Ryan Neufeld.

Notes

Crowdsourced cookbook of about 200 recipes from O'Reilly. Work in progress as of September 2013 but over 100 recipes are already available in the repository.

Where You Can Buy It

Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer

By Brian Marick.

Notes

This is a book about functional programming for those with object-oriented programming backgrounds that uses Clojure in examples.

It is often cited as a good introductory book for newcomers to Clojure.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure Programming

By Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, and Christophe Grand.

Notes

An excellent introductory book. Friendly to newcomers to the language and functional programming in general.

Where You Can Buy It

Programming Clojure, 2nd Ed

By Stuart Halloway and Aaron Bedra.

Notes

2nd edition of the oldest book about Clojure. Updated for Clojure 1.3+ and includes new content, for example, introduction to test.generative, a Clojure testing framework similar to QuickCheck. A good book for beginners.

Where You Can Buy It

The Joy of Clojure, 1st Ed

By Michael Fogus and Chris Houser.

Notes

It's not an overstatement to say that this is a legendary book in the Clojure community. Covers "the what and why of Clojure". To really appreciate it, however, you will need to have some real Clojure experience under your belt.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook

By Eric Rochester.

Notes

Covers multiple topics related to data analysis and data processing:

  • Acquiring data
  • Cleaning data
  • Analyzing data
  • Visualizing data
  • Basic statistics
  • Basic machine learning

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure in Action, 2nd Ed

By Amit Rathore.

Notes

Extended version of the first edition that covers Clojure 1.5, ClojureScript and Datomic.

Where You Can Buy It

  • From Manning, MEAP eBook (Kindle, ePub, PDF).

Clojure Made Simple

By John Stevenson.

Notes

A quick taste of Clojure for developers curious about the language. Its aimed at the complete beginner who wants to give Clojure a quick try before making a big investment. Its a short book in ebook only form and available for a few dollars.

Where You Can Buy It

Practical Clojure

By Luke VanderHart, Stuart Sierra.

Notes

A good introductory book.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure in Action, 1st Ed

By Amit Rathore.

Notes

Contains many practical examples. The last chapter on metaprogramming and DSLs is fantastic.

This book covers Clojure 1.2. There were breaking changes in the language between Clojure 1.2 and 1.3, keep this in mind.

Where You Can Buy It

Clojure - Grundlagen, Concurrent Programming, Java

By Stefan Kamphausen, Tim Oliver Kaiser

Notes

  • Written in German
  • This book covers Clojure 1.2. There were breaking changes in the language between Clojure 1.2 and 1.3, keep this in mind. The chapter on the contrib library in particular can be considered outdated.

Where You Can Buy It

Programming Clojure, 1st Ed

By Stuart Halloway.

Notes

The oldest book on Clojure. Please consider getting the 2nd edition which covers a more recent version and includes several updates.

This book covers Clojure 1.2.

Where You Can Buy It

Books About ClojureScript

Learning ClojureScript

By W. David Jarvis, Rafik Naccache & Allen Rohner

Notes

Master the art of agile single page web application development with ClojureScript

Where You Can Buy It

ClojureScript: Up and Running

By Stuart Sierra and Luke VanderHart.

Notes

The first book about ClojureScript, a Clojure implementation that compiles to JavaScript.

Where You Can Buy It

  • From O'Reilly, eBook (Kindle, ePub, PDF) or paperback.