Web Development with Clojure: Build Bulletproof Web Apps with Less Code by Sotnikov, Dmitri (2014) Paperback

by Dmitri Sotnikov

Excellent Book

Genres: Programming, Technology, Software

Paperback

First published August 28, 2013

Reviews

[Alex Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides not only good overview of the Clojure's libraries for web development, but also shows how to build complete application (picture gallery with support of multiple users, etc.).
Besides this, book describes how to use profiles for dev & production, how to deploy applications.
In the final parts, book describes templating libraries, and briefly shows how to write client-side code with ClojureScript.

P.S. To read this book you already should be familiar with the Clojure.

[Oleksandr Golovatyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice book for learning Clojure. Not too much boring info and there are some simple examples for starting web app by Clojure

[Michael Mcdermott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the beta version of the second edition. I think it was a good introduction to web development in the Clojure world. It mainly focuses on the Luminus approach, but much of the ideas are generalizable.

I think the testing section could have covered a little more, but that could be because I come from a background where integration tests are more prevalent. It seems that dynamic languages do lean this direction a bit more, particularly an app built with Reagent it would have been good to see how to test the client side of the application. I am not sure if this is omitted because of the general complexity of the subject, or something else.

[Jeroen Nijs · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good overview of the current best practices for writing web applications with Clojure. I did miss a section on i18n and l10n. I understand that I can find that information elsewhere, but it would be nice to have it all in one place.

Near the end the examples get sloppier, and require some fixes if you are following along on the computer. But the source code that you can download from the book's web site is correct, so you can always use that instead.

[Julio Biason · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all, this book suffers from the same mistakes every single Lisp-like language book I've read: They throw a truck at you, then slowly, while you're being crushed by it, explain each part that creates a truck -- In other words, they throw a large piece of code at you and then slowly explain each part of it.

Even worst, in the last parts, it's basically "here is truck, take it" -- very little explanation about the code itself, just "we'll do this" and code. What the pieces of code mean, that's entirely to you.

Another problem: no tests. The author prefers the REPL approach, which is okay for little projects, but for projects that should last longer than a weekend project. No only that, but even the tests are wrong, because it mocks the database -- Database is part of your project so it should be tested along all the other tests.

And, on top of that, there is a REST server with sessions, and a lot of code just to keep the frontend session in sync with the server session. That's actually not how a REST server works.

And while I usually don't comment the technology behind the book (because it's not the author's creation), I really have to ask if Clojure is the right tool for web servers. I mean, a lot about Clojure is about immutability and a lot about the shown code is forcing mutability -- one function even is composed with nothing but functions that force mutability.

So, not only the book itself doesn't give a clear picture about web development in Clojure, the language itself doesn't appear appropriate for such task.

[Kaj Ström · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good way to get started developing web applications with Clojure. All of the important things you are going to need developing web applications are addressed. I consider WebSocket related material nice addition to this, as it was my first hands-on exposure to using them.

No prior experience with Clojure is required, but I would say that reading a book on Clojure basics is highly useful. I would have struggled a lot more if this was my first exposure to Clojure.

The book contains a lot of examples to follow through which is very useful to get started building your own projects. As a downside to these examples, I wasn't able to use the versions suggested in the book, so I had to go with the latest versions and because of this there was some additional hassle for me. As a learning experience the extra searching was useful, but made following the book a lot more time consuming.

If Goodreads supported half stars I would have given 3.5, but as it doesn't I feel this book is closer to 4 stars than three.

[Matvey Aksenov · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot of content in the book. In fact, I'm not even convinced I wanted to learn this much about Clojure webdev.

[Stefan Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book goes over a bunch of libraries you can use to make web applications in Clojure. It does not give you much more compared to their respective websites, but it's in one place and you can read it if you're curious what's going on in that area.

[Jindřich Mynarz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I particularly liked the section on deployment options and testing. However, some parts of the book felt as unnecessary appendices, e.g., the introduction to document DBs.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most complete review there is of making an SPA with microservices in Clojure/Script.

That said, it's not as polished as the RailsTutorial and uses some idiomatic Clojure that I really had to fuss over for a bit. It was also sometimes hard to tell when I was supposed to change code.

But I learned *a lot*.