This book offers a cookbook of recipes using ClojureScript and its libraries for reactive web programming. According to the back cover, the intended readership level is beginning to intermediate. I had high hopes for this book. This is a great yet under-documented topic, and a good introductory resource is sorely needed. Parts of this book are quite useful; however, the good parts are hard to find and mostly inaccessible to beginners.

First of all, the book is poorly edited. It is full of typographical errors, misused English, and even coding errors. It is hard to find a dozen consecutive pages that do not contain at least one howler. This is a shame. The author knows his material, and a good editor would have made all the difference. This is also reflected in the source distribution offered on the Apress website: it is a 1.3 gigabyte (GB) zip file, consisting mostly of disposable “work product” files that should have been cleaned up before publication.

At the same time, the book is full of long code fragments that offer little advantage over the full source available in the online distribution. I would have greatly preferred using those pages for clearer and more in-depth explanatory text.

The bigger problem is that the book’s coverage and selection of libraries is eccentric and at times downright weird. In a 2017 book on reactive in ClojureScript, it is astounding to see no mention of Om whatsoever and only very superficial coverage of re-frame. Other choices, though less blatant, were also surprising. In at least one instance, the book uses a library that had been poorly supported for at least 18 months before the book published.

Sadly, too, this book is not appropriate for beginners. I could not tell how much prior knowledge the author assumes of his readers. He carefully explains “let,” yet assumes deep understanding of “reset.”

The only audience for this book is experienced ClojureScript and Reagent programmers interested in seeing an eclectic set of useful libraries. For them--and I include myself in this population--the book is fun. It introduced me to several libraries that I intend to explore more deeply. For this limited audience, I do recommend it.

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