Russ Olsen

Started reading this book on a Thursday and finished on a Sunday, enjoying every page.

For background, I'm a novice-intermediate at Clojure ... good enough to write web apps in it, good enough to be functionally minded even! But it's clear that my code is pretty hamfisted at times and my functions often feel like slabs rather than the supposedly beautiful shapes that Lisp developers tend to advertise themselves as writing. Things like spec intrigue me and frighten me and confuse me. Propert Based Testing is something that I could only understand as awesome but never really understood how to use.

This book is git a sweet spot in that it didn't linger too long over the basics or even the gist of the advanced topics it was trying to explain, but showed just enough to get into the philosophical crux of why one would want to hone skills in those areas. The beauty of this book is that it actually does a good job of explaining to someone who _does not yet think_ in Clojure the steps and orientation they should begin to have (I feel that a lot of authors who have it this point do so in a utopian way but are too far enlightened to articulate that enlightenment in the coarse thinking many of us yet require)

This book has made me far less afraid of spec, of property based testing, of lazy sequences, and of macros. I feel motivated to jump into the REPL and just _play_, rather than feeling bad because I don't know what a transducer is. This book doesn't explain what those particular things are (which I only know about because Clojurists gush about them all the time) but I feel more comfortable with the idea that there is a simple explanation and use case and mental framework for them just waiting to be expressed.

I highly recommend this book as part of one's "thinking in Lisp" bookshelf; it doesn't wrestle you into the great leaps of cognition that the academic exemplars (SICP, The Little Schemer) do, but it is an approachable book that comforts you and promises you that there are practical and enjoyable rewards for going down this path. It's a great little approachable read to recenter yourself on when your brain has discombobulated, and a comforting read when yo don't want to read a book you feel like taking a break from the feeling of being a brain navigating the cosmos.… (more)