Clojure High Performance Programming, Second Edition: Become an expert at writing fast and high performant code in Clojure 1.7.0 , Second Edition

Kumar

$19.99 per month

4.4 (5 Ratings)

Paperback Sep 2015 198 pages 2nd Edition

Kumar

$19.99 per month

4.4 (5 Ratings)

Paperback Sep 2015 198 pages 2nd Edition

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Description

Clojure treats code as data and has a macro system. It focuses on programming with immutable values and explicit progression-of-time constructs, which are intended to facilitate the development of more robust programs, particularly multithreaded ones. It is built with performance, pragmatism, and simplicity in mind. Like most general purpose languages, various Clojure features have different performance characteristics that one should know in order to write high performance code. This book shows you how to evaluate the performance implications of various Clojure abstractions, discover their underpinnings, and apply the right approach for optimum performance in real-world programs. It starts by helping you classify various use cases and the need for them with respect to performance and analysis of various performance aspects. You will also learn the performance vocabulary that experts use throughout the world and discover various Clojure data structures, abstractions, and their performance characteristics. Further, the book will guide you through enhancing performance by using Java interoperability and JVM-specific features from Clojure. It also highlights the importance of using the right concurrent data structure and Java concurrency abstractions. This book also sheds light on performance metrics for measuring, how to measure, and how to visualize and monitor the collected data. At the end of the book, you will learn to run a performance profiler, identify bottlenecks, tune performance, and refactor code to get a better performance.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for intermediate Clojure developers who are looking to get a good grip on achieving optimum performance. Having a basic knowledge of Java would be helpful.

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Aaron B. Iba Nov 29, 2016

I've been programming in Clojure for 5 years and recently took on a very performance-critical project. I found this book to be extremely helpful and practical for writing high-performance Clojure code. As other reviewers have noted, the book covers a lot of different topics, but I just skipped the ones I was already familiar with and studied the stuff that was new to me -- and there was a lot of great new stuff. Overall I highly recommend this book and I hope the author comes out with new editions for new versions of Clojure.

Amazon Verified review

Lucas Medeiros Reis Oct 25, 2015

I appreciate technical books that present not only theory, but useful practical tips as well. A lot of books fall somewhere in the middle, presenting little or no theory, and techniques that do not fit in real world projects. This book rises far above this threshold. My main highlights are:Chapter one, "Performance by Design". Made me think differently about performance no matter which language I'll be using.Chapter four, "Host Performance". Learned a lot about the JVM.Chapter six, "Measuring Performance". Measuring is maybe the most important part of performance tuning, and this chapter has both theory and practical Clojure tips.

Oleg Okun Nov 13, 2015

This book is for Clojure professionals thinking of practical applications of their code. It covers a broad range of topics, including use case classification according to performance requirements (CPU, memory, cache, input/output, online and offline data processing), performance characteristics (latency, bandwidth, throughput), data structures and how Clojure stores different types of objects, computational complexity of operations involving these types, abstractions and how to make decisions about which abstraction to use depending on performance use cases, Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on which Clojure runs (by default, Clojure may not produce optimized JVM bytecode!; hence, understanding of how Clojure interacts with Java is of importance), influence of host (hardware + JVM) characteristics on performance, concurrency and concurrency related data structures, parallelization support, measuring and optimizing performance (code profiling, performance statistics).

Blake Watson Oct 25, 2015

This is a big, big topic crammed into a smallish (160+, excluding TOC, index, etc.) page book, but for all that, if you use it right it can be very helpful. This is not a beginner's book: it describes the nitty-gritty of how Clojure deals with various situations, which are things you don't want to concern yourself with until you have to. Laziness is covered, of course, as is chunking, transducers, mutability, transients, looping/recursion, and so on, and that's just Chapter 2! (Chapter 1 is mostly nomenclature.)Now, frankly, if I'm writing a 160 page book on optimization, I would probably take all 160 pages to talk about the material in Chapter 2. These are the underpinnings of the high level aspects of Clojure, but Kumar goes on to spend a chapter on Java bytecode, hardware optimizations. It's a lot of material, and it's only touched on here, by-and-large.I didn't find that to be a bad thing, however. It's perhaps less useful than it might be if you had a giant book that had your exact problem in it, I suppose, but what I've done is to read a chapter through quickly, and then look at my code and see if I can apply what I learned there. This not only has the potential to make the code faster, but to give you a deeper understanding of what's going on under the covers.You want to know going in, though. There's not a lot of hand-holding. I'm still pondering over the section on Agents, which I'm pretty sure I've heard Rich Hickey say he never uses. I kind of wanted the "Measuring Performance" (chapter 6) up front since that's what we're trying to do. Maybe Chapter 7, too.Anyway, this approach with this material worked for me, and I liked the way it removed some of the mystery of Clojure for me, or at least help me resolve some of the mystery by pointing me in the right direction.

Mr C M Fleming Dec 08, 2015

Overall, I thought this book was a good read. It provides a good overview of many essential concepts - throughput, bandwidth and latency, concurrency concepts, touches lightly on algorithmic complexity and also covers the essential statistical concepts required to understand Criterium's output and reason about performance. It's coverage of the Clojure data structures and especially the concurrency constructs is very detailed.However I came away feeling that there was a lack of actionable information in the book. As an experienced Clojure developer, I learned several things that I didn't know previously, but only as brief pointers to external information. The book spent a long time on topics which are undoubtedly interesting, but provided little guidance on what the information means for someone trying to improve the performance of their programs. For example, the discussion of modern processor and memory architecture was interesting and detailed, but how should I apply that knowledge to my projects, especially in a very high-level language such as Clojure? Subjects such as OS level profiling are mentioned, but these are highly specialised topics which have no place in a book this short.In the end I think this book treads an uneasy path - it's very detailed in places, but is too short to contain enough information to make many of the topics worth while. In the end, it tries to address an enormous topic in a short book, and I think it would have been better to have remained more focused on how Clojure developers specifically can improve their programs' performance. It will be useful to someone without a lot of experience in JVM or Clojure performance topics, but more experienced users will probably find it comes up short.

Clojure High Performance Programming, Second Edition: Become an expert at writing fast and high performant code in Clojure 1.7.0 , Second Edition

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