Название: Mastering Clojure Macros: Write Cleaner, Faster, Smarter Code (Version P1.0)
Автор: Colin Jones
Издательство: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Год: August 2014
Страниц: 111
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

Level up your skills by taking advantage of Clojure's powerful macro system. Macros make hard things possible and normal things easy. They can be tricky to use, and this book will help you deftly navigate the terrain. You'll discover how to write straightforward code that avoids duplication and clarifies your intentions. You'll learn how and why to write macros. You'll learn to recognize situations when using a macro would (and wouldn't!) be helpful. And you'll use macros to remove unnecessary code and build new language features.

Clojure offers some sharp tools in its toolbox, and one of the sharpest is its macro system. This book will help you write macros using Clojure, and more importantly, recognize when you should be using macros in the first place. There are a number of reasons to learn Clojure. The discipline of staying immutable by default, the simplicity of functions as first-class entities, the practicality of the JVM, and... well, I could go on and on, but this book’s goal isn’t to sell you on Clojure.

The Lisp "code-as-data" philosophy gives tremendous advantages to macro authors and users. You can use macros to evaluate code in other contexts, move computations to compile time, and create beautiful API layers. You don't need to wait on the Clojure language itself to add new features, you'll learn how to implement even the lowest-level features as macros. You'll step through representative samples of how to use macros in production libraries and applications, find clear details on how to construct macros, and learn pointers to avoid obstacles that often trip up macro amateurs.

Clojure stands on the shoulders of giants, with influences from several functional and object-oriented languages, database and distributed systems technologies, and of course the tremendous force of nature that is its creator, Rich Hickey. And despite Clojure’s youth, we’ve already started to see some cross-pollination into other language communities. But one of the real killer features of Clojure is the macro system, which is similar in many ways to Common Lisp’s but brings its own modern flair to the area. Macros in Clojure are an elegant metaprogramming system, a means to accomplish goals that might seem impossible in other languages.

By the time you finish this book, you'll be thinking like a macro professional.

What You Need: The book examples have been developed under Clojure 1.6.0, although earlier and later versions of Clojure may work as well. You'll want to use Leiningen 2.x in order to follow along with the examples that use external projects.

Who Is This Book For?
This book assumes that you’ve programmed in Clojure a bit but that you’re not yet a master of Clojure macros. Experienced Clojure programmers will no doubt recognize situations they’ve encountered before, whereas newer Clojure folks will learn to avoid some of the stumbles the rest of us have made when learning macros. Macros are typically one of the most difficult features, and this book will help anyone who wants to understand how they work and when to use them.