0.0 Preliminaries

I hope to be posting a small series of exercises to help people learn Clojure.

To be able to follow along, a development environment is pretty much essential!

Quick and Easy

If you want this really, really quick and cheap, you can access an in-browser Clojure development at TryClojure:

http://www.tryclj.com/

...which even includes a little tutorial.

If you feel ready for a "real" Clojure programming experience, read on!

Doing it right

Clojure runs on the Java Virtual machine. To use it, you will need to download and install the Java Development Kit (JDK). The "standard" JDK is available from Oracle at this link:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

Finally, the actual development environment! Some folks enjoy working with Nightcode, and because it's very easy to install, that's what I'll be using in what follows. You can download it from here as a single jar file:

https://sekao.net/nightcode/

You'll want to give it a directory to run in. Then, to start it up, you have to do something like

java -jar nightcode-0.4.7-standalone.jar

The Nightcode site has a short description on how to get started:

https://github.com/ClojureBridge/getting-started/blob/master/nightcode.md

If you go with Nightcode, that will pull in (by download) Clojure and everything else it needs. That may take a little while the first time you click some buttons in Nightcode. After that it becomes quicker.

Different strokes

If you prefer a different JDK or a different development environment, there's plenty of choices out there. I personally use Eclipse and the CounterClockwise plugin but have also had good experiences with LightTable. The choice is up to you; the FB group, myself included, will be happy to help you if we can.

Where to go from here

This tutorial is organized as a sequence of pages. The list of pages is at the top right (under Pages), and you may do best to visit them in top-to-bottom order.