[tomku]

Joy of Clojure is about understanding the philosophy of Clojure, and using the language's built-in abstractions in an idiomatic way. It's not really a "first book on Clojure" for someone that doesn't know the language at all, but if you know the basics you can use it to solidify your understanding.

Clojure in Action is more of a practical, get-shit-done book. It covers things like databases, web frameworks, TDD and message queues in the context of Clojure. It also has a brief introduction to the language itself and some coverage of functional programming idioms, but the focus is more strongly on real-world usage rather than deep understanding.

[c0mpute]

Thank you, that is a helpful description.

So for a Clojure noob (like me) it might be better to start with Clojure in Action and then read Joy of Clojure.

[nickbarnwell]

I started with Clojure about six months ago now and currently use it for all personal projects and day-to-day as part of my course of studies.

I started with Joy of Clojure and found it hard to wrap my head around - it's commonly recommended you read it as your second book on Clojure, and it quickly became apparent to me why :) I jumped over to Clojure Programming and things immediately started to click in a way they'd not with JoC; after a couple thousand more lines of code and a few tens of 4clojure problems, I reread fogus, et al's work and had a much better time of it.

[miloshadzic]

My advice is to get Clojure Programming (http://www.clojurebook.com). Good luck and have fun.

[chongli]

Joy of Clojure is worth revisiting after you've gained enough experience to be confident in writing Clojure code.