Every time I've tried to follow the setup tutorial in that book I've not been able to get something basic to work, like the REPL or the flycheck parser. It's prevented me from really diving in to be honest.
Probably give Emacs Live (https://overtone.github.io/emacs-live/) or Spacemacs (http://spacemacs.org/) with the Clojure layer installed a try. Learning Emacs and Clojure both at the same time can be kinda overwhelming though and if you are just interested in Clojure and not Emacs you should probably just start with Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com/)
I'll try one of those -- might be good to have something separate. I use Emacs as my main editor and there's already a lot added onto it. Thanks for the links.