I was recently approached by Packt Publishing asking if I’d review Shantanu Kuma’s book Clojure High Performance Programming . It sounded interesting so I took them up on their offer for a free copy and read it over two flights.

Unsurprisingly the table of contents does a good job describing the book. This book doesn’t dive too deep into any one topic but instead gives you a taste of each.

Overall the book was pretty good. It provides interesting examples of real world Clojure code that solve specific performance problems. It talks about host performance, both JVM and hardware, concerns which are both areas that shouldn’t be overlooked. I thought the book was best when showing examples of well performing code from libraries.

I’d recommend this book for developers who aren’t past the beginning stages of writing performant code. It does a good job introducing the topics you’ll want to think about when trying to craft well performing programs.

It isn’t for the developer who has spent years optimizing code for performance. Those developers are already going to be familiar with the language and concerns of writing high performance code.

If I could add anything to the book it would be a chapter about measuring performance in production. If you are writing high performance programs it has been my experience that you must measure in production. This is easiest to do if you build measuring in from the very beginning.