Clojure Brain Teasers

Exercise Your Mind

by: Alex Miller and Lorilyn Jordan Miller

Published 2025-04-01
Internal code mmclobrain
Print status In Print
Pages 130
User level Beginner
Keywords Clojure, exercises, puzzle, quiz, self test
Related titles
  • Programming Clojure – Alex Miller, Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra
  • Getting Clojure – Russ Olsen
  • Clojure Applied – Ben Vandgrift, Alex Miller
ISBN 9798888651292
Other ISBN
BISACs GAM008000
COM051440
COM051440
https://media.pragprog.com/covers/mmclobrain.jpg

Highlight

Challenge your knowledge of Clojure with 25 short Clojure teasers, sometimes with surprising results! Inspired by years of developer questions and feedback, these teasers are handpicked to clarify common points of confusion. Each code challenge illustrates Clojure’s elegant design, explaining how and why it works. Enjoy these simple exercises solo or with friends to find gaps in your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and gain valuable insights. Tackle the most common points of confusion Clojure developers encounter, become more efficient when writing and debugging, and better predict the outcomes of Clojure code. Regardless of your Clojure experience, you’re certain to learn something new.

Description

You know Clojure, but do you really understand it? You may know the mechanics and idioms, but what about the deeper, implicit concepts driving the design? Discover and explore the real Clojure, testing and supplementing your understanding of why this data-driven functional programming language works the way it does.

You’ll start with the basic concepts such as numeric types, numeric promotion, and logical truth. But the backbone of Clojure is its focus on immutable data, centered around the Clojure collections. Learn about collection equality, polymorphism on nil, adding and finding elements in different collection types, and sorted collections. Explore Clojure’s evaluation model, including the Clojure reader, quoting, evaluation, and macro expansion. Finally, learn about the core library functions like `case`, `concat`, `for`, `partial`, and the details of type hinting, vars, and destructuring. Understand the peculiarities of these functions and how to apply them to your advantage in future programs.

Use these new insights to build your own concise, expressive, and flexible code. Don’t just use Clojure, master it.

Contents and Extracts

Introduction