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Ask HN: Land of Lisp for learning clojure?

9 points by deathflute ↗ HN
Is Land of Lisp a good way to learn lisp if I am primarily interested in hacking clojure? I should add that I am an experienced programmer, so a clojure specific book with rigor is fine with me. I am unable to decide if a generic lisp(clisp) book is better than a specific clojure book to bootstrap.

3 comments

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gsivil
Land of Lisp is focused on Common Lisp( and CLISP as environment of choice). As the author says in Chapter 1: "We'll be dipping our toes in some Arc and Clojure in the epilogue."

Bottom line: the book is a charming and quite solid introduction to Common Lisp. If you want specifically a book for Clojure and only Clojure this is not the one.

deathflute
I should have been more clear - My goal is to become a competent lisp programmer first and foremost. I will probably end up choosing clojure for my projects because I already have lots of java code and a jvm lisp dialect is more suitable.
ronnieCA
It's kind of like saying, I've heard of this wonderful book on learning French, can I use it to learn Spanish? They're similar languages, but not the same. The grammer is close, but different. The vocabulary is close, but different.

That being said, Land of Lisp is a fantastic way to get your feet wet in functional programming. I would highly suggest giving it a whirl. Learning Common Lisp will definitely help in learning Clojure. But you really need to look at it as two distinct steps towards your goal of learning Clojure.

There is also a new Clojure book coming out at the end of the month called the Joy of Clojure, which I'm really excited about. Currently the only two books out are Stewart Halloway's Programming Clojure, which is excellent. and Stuart Sierra's Practical Clojure, which is also very, very good. They are both focussed on Clojure 1.0, however, so you'll miss out on some of the features brought by 1.1 and 1.2. I own both, and can't recommend one over the other, though I might lean towards Practical Clojure purely for personal preference.