learning clojure

[syamajala]

How easy is it to pick up clojure without having any previous java
experience? I have plenty of common lisp experience, but have just
never bothered learning java. I recently got a chance to watch the
boston lisp talk on clojure, and it looks fairly straightforward, but
I feel that not having any knowledge of java might make it a little
hard to do more advanced things.

[Vincent Foley]

As somebody who did only a few hours of Java, but knows object
oriented programming well and had its fair share of fun with Common
Lisp, Scheme and Haskell, Clojure was quite easy to pick up. For all
pure Clojure stuff, I don't think that you need to know anything about
Java. When you work with Java libs, it's useful to know about static
vs instance methods, static members, reading Javadoc, etc.

I am currently writing a small tutorial (nothing of the scope of
Stuart's book) on how to fetch web comics online. I have two parts so
far, and both show a little of the Java interop functionality. Let me
know if it's useful

http://gnuvince.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/fetching-web-comics-with-clojure-part-1/
http://gnuvince.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/fetching-web-comics-with-clojure-part-2/

Good luck,

Vincent.

[Stuart Sierra]

It's useful to know the standard Java libraries, especially for File/
IO stuff. You can pick up nearly all of it from the Sun Java
tutorials:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

-Stuart Sierra

On Nov 23, 11:34 pm, syamajala <syamaj...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Ethan Herdrick]

For the File / IO things, skip the Java libs - they are pretty low
level. Go with the Jakarta Commons libs:
http://commons.apache.org/io/description.html , as Stuart has
recommended elsewhere.