Chapter 1. Getting Started with Clojure

Welcome to the world of Clojure! If you are here, you probably know a little about Lisp or Clojure, but you don't really have an idea of how things work in this world.

We will get to know Clojure by comparing each feature to what you already know from Java. You will see that there are lists, maps and sets just like in Java, but they are immutable. To work with these kinds of collections, you need a different approach; a different paradigm.

This is what we will try to accomplish in this book, to give you a different way to approach problems. We hope you end up using Clojure in your every day life, but if you don't, we hope you use a new approach toward problem solving.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Getting to know Clojure
• Installing Leiningen
• Using a Read Eval Print Loop (REPL)
• Installing and using Cursive Clojure
• Clojure's simple syntax
• Clojure's data types and their relationship to the JVM's data types
• Special syntax for functions