Full name: Shantanu Kumar, "Clojure High Performance Programming", 2013.
"Clojure High Performance Programming" claims to be a guide to everything related to writing high-performance Clojure code. Published in 2013, it is expected to be a little outdated, considering the fast pace at which Clojure ecosystem evolves. However, there are not many books dedicated exclusively to performance in Clojure, so it still makes sense to review this one.
The book indeed covers plenty of topics. It starts with performance vocabulary,
general performance metrics and useful latencies — something that would be
useful for beginners in the field of performance optimizations. Then it moves
onto Clojure abstractions, data structures and their complexity guarantees. A
few obscure data structures are also mentioned (like PersistentTreeMap).
Next chapter is about Clojure-Java interop, and how it can be used to squeeze additional performance from your program. It is followed by a section about host performance (both bare metal and JVM), things like memory layout, CPU caches, JIT. An entire chapter is dedicated to Clojure concurrency tools like refs and agents, and also a few words are written about Java's own concurrency primitives.
Chapter six focuses on ways of measuring and optimizing performance bottom-up, by profiling various parts of the program. In contrast, the next chapter is about top-down performance optimizations at the design level — it covers things like pooling, batching, and caching.
The book's worst sin is that it has a very incoherent structure. In a pursuit of writing a little bit about everything the author sacrificed the cohesion between the chapters, so it doesn't feel like a continuous resource, rather a compilation of topics.
Another big problem is that this book is not so much about Clojure. This makes it an OK material for beginners, but less useful for those who seek knowledge on how to optimize Clojure programs specifically. Clojure parts are hidden between paragraphs of generic data, and those parts honestly feel forced. The connection between the described generic problem and the specific Clojure solution isn't often vivid.
Not author's fault, of course, but the book is already four years old. Such important topics like core.async and transducers are missing.
Overall, the author managed to fit a lot of different information into a rather thin book. It may be recommended to novices in the world of performance optimizations for its breadth. For everyone else, it would be better to search for a more systematic material on the Web.
