Has anyone read Clojure Data Structures and Algorithms Cookbook yet? $40 seems pretty expensive for a 200 page eBook so I’m nervous about pulling the trigger.

That’s a Packt book?

It is.

I’m a bit wary of Packt books in general. They do seem higher priced than they deserve.

But at least Packt churn out books with steady regularity and they’re always approaching several of us to write new ones (I think they’ve asked me to write three so far).

I just don’t have the time, which is why I turn them down.

I think I’ll hold off until I see a review somewhere. I already have the MEAP of Grokking Algorithms which is pretty good.

@akiva: It's available on safari books if that helps, seems like the Packt books go up there pretty quickly. http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/clojure/9781785281457

Didn’t even think about that. Might be time to restart my Safari account then. Thanks, @shaun-mahood.

I tend to jump in on beta books which aren’t available on Safari so I let that account die.

akiva: the newer version of safari includes access to "rough cuts"

I agree with what @seancorfield said. I’ve bought a number of Packt books and most of them have disappointed me.

@nullptr, but that’s only for O’Reilly books, yeah?

they are also very expensive.

If you want to read about data structures, this is a better book, imo, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf

akiva: maybe -- not sure if other publishers there do the same pre-release thing

Clojure Reactive Programming by @leonardoborges is on Packt, I thought it was pretty fantastic.

@roberto: Chris Okasaki's book is also on Safari http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/9780521631242

@roberto, the issue I run into is that I never went to university; I’m self-taught. So most books on data structures and algorithms rely on a level of schooling I never received.

yeah, I bought the book instead of downloading it for free.

@akiva: I would say give the free version of okasaki’s book a try, and if you feel you are getting into it, then continue reading it.

If you buy the clojure book, nothing guarantees it will be good either, or understandable.

Yeah, I’m going to do that. I’m smart enough that I’ve built on 15 years of self-taught experience to reach senior level and so forth.

also, okasaki’s is a seminal book in data structures, some of the data structures in clojure were inspired by that book.

This is the one area where I lack so I’ve been wanting to address it.

yeah, you are not the only one. I have a formal education in CS, but i’ve never really have to build any data structures for any of my jobs

so I know how you feel.

I’ve forgotten most of it, but I do enjoy reading stuff from time to time, even though most of it goes over my head.

hell, I’m even taking a calculus course on coursera right now, just to refresh my memory. It is incredible how much I’ve forgotten because I never used it.

Yeah, I came up doing .NET programming where most of that stuff is just handled for you.

And I lack in a lot of areas, actually. I just meant as far as CS fundamentals go.

New little thing to manage Clojure dependencies: https://github.com/LonoCloud/lein-unison

@ordnungswidrig: ^^ might help with what you were asking about the other day

@akiva @seancorfield just to give you an idea of some of the thing PacktPub does, I got an unsolicited email through my GitHub email from them a few months ago telling me I’d be great to write a book about penetration testing and security. I’ve never run a penetration test in my life. That’s not to say this book in particular is bad, but they’re not doing themselves any favours

Right, and they’ve asked me to write books on topics that I’m not qualified for, nor interested in at all.

The more I hear about it, the more shady it all seems.

Their author schedule is always pretty tight and they churn the books out very quickly.

A couple of friends of mine have written Packt books and have said they’d never work with them again

But then, writing a book is a pretty brutal, thankless task at the best of times...

@bostonaholic: thanks for the heads-up. will have a look

anyone have experience running a luminusweb template in cursive with the sassc plugin? i keep getting an error that sassc can’t be found, even though when i run lein repl from the command line it works fine. OS 10.11

@seancorfield: Probably the same friends - but yes, heard similar things about packt