I’m slowly working my way through Stuart Holloway’s Programming Clojure book (and using slowly in that phrase does a terrible disservice to the word) and so far, I’m enjoying it. I had a run at Common Lisp a couple of years ago and ran into a brick wall for the most part (I think football season started). I’m mostly playing with Clojure to get a different perspective on programming apart from my usual day job as a .Net developer.
All that intro aside, I wrote about both starting and stopping the REPL here. In working through the book, you need to have the clojure install directory, the clojure-contrib directory and the code from the book on your CLASSPATH. Instead of modifying that in the environment variables on Windows, it’s a great deal easier (and smarter according to IBM to just modify the CLASSPATH at startup using the command line. This is extra easy if you created the clojure.bat file I wrote about in my previous entry linked above. You can just change the one line in it to “java -cp path_to_clojureclojure.jar;path_to_clojurecontribclojure-contrib.jar;path_to_book_code clojure.lang.Repl”. Once you’ve done that, you’re up and running with the book samples.
Being both a Java dummy and a Clojure dummy, I’ll try to keep posting tips from my foray here.