CDS: A Clojure Doc Site

An assorted collection of tutorials, guides, and other documentation (by various authors) for the Clojure programming language and its ecosystem. Read the guides online.

Goals

The goal is to produce quality technical documentation with limited duplication between guides, and eventually have these documents hosted at doc.clojure.org.

What's not here:

• Cheatsheets. Those can be found at clojure.org/cheatsheet, or with tooltips at jafingerhut.github.com. There is also an unofficial ClojureScript cheatsheet available for download and contribution.
• API reference docs. Those can currently be found (with examples) at Clojuredocs.

Clojuredocs needs a lot of work and redesign (as in, the way it works) which will take a while. CDS is not concerned with providing the API reference; only tutorials, guides, and linking to other relevant resources.

Structure

CDS is structured as a number of guides. They broadly fall into 4 categories:

• Tutorials
• Language guides
• Tool guides
• Cookbooks

Tutorials

These guides are for complete newcomers and should include a lot of hand holding. They don't assume any previous familiarity with Clojure, the JVM, the JVM tool ecosystem, functional programming, immutability, and so on.

Target audience: newcomers to the language.

Language guides

These guides are more in-depth, focused on various aspects of the language and interoperability. Examples of such guides include:

• Sequences
• Interoperability
• Reference types
• Laziness
• Macros and compilation

Target audience: from developers who already have some familiarity with the language to those who have been using it for a while.

Tools & Ecosystem guides

These guides cover key Clojure ecosystem tools such as Leiningen, Clojars, REPLy, nREPL, Emacs clojure-mode, VimClojure, Counterclockwise, La Clojure, etc. It also covers important ecosystem projects that are not tools: books, ClojureSphere, ClojureWerkz, Flatland and so on.

Target audience: all developers using or interested in the language.

Cookbooks

Concise Clojure example code, categorized by subject.

How To Contribute

First of all: you can contribute to Clojure documentation even if you have 15 minutes to spare a day. To give you an example, here's what 2 people could produce in about 6 months in their spare time:

• Monger documentation
• Neocons documentation
• Welle documentation
• Elastisch documentation
• Langohr documentation
• Quartzite documentation

No contribution is too small: feel free to suggest grammar improvements, better code examples, submit pull requests with just one new paragraph or even a couple of spelling corrections. Editing and proof-reading is also a great way to contribute.

If you found a mistake you'd like to report and do not want to make edits and go through the pull request process, please post your findings on the Clojure mailing list, or else find us on #clojure-doc (IRC) at freenode.

Thank you!

Toolchain

README-tools.md covers development environment setup and how to run a local server.

Contributing To Existing Guides

First, pick a topic that sounds interesting. Writing documentation takes some effort and working on something that is interesting to you will motivate you. Next, find the article you want to contribute to under ./articles/. It is a Markdown file with inline code snippets.

At the top of each article you will usually find what it is supposed to cover. Please stick to that list.

Then fork the repository, create a topic branch, and start writing.

When writing, periodically view results in the browser (see the Toolchain readme about running a local server) and make sure code examples are rendered correctly and that there are no serious formatting issues. If you are not a Markdown or CSS guru, it's OK, but submitting changes that seriously break formatting and force maintainers to work on fixing them is not very productive (or nice).

After making the changes you want, run them by a fellow developer, edit them a couple of times and submit a pull request on GitHub. Please be patient. It may take a while for CDS maintainers to get to your pull request, read your changes, and suggest improvements.

Don't get discouraged if asked to make more edits or even completely rewrite some parts from scratch. All good documentation out there is a result of dozens of edits, corrections, and sometimes ground-up rewrites. This is normal. We want Clojure documentation to be high quality just like the language and clojure.core.

For some guidance on writing great documentation, see http://jacobian.org/writing/great-documentation/.

Contributing New Guides

If you feel there may be a guide missing, please run your idea by other CDS contributors on the Clojure mailing list.

What You Must Not Do

Please respect copyright of other Clojure-related content out there. You must not copy content from clojure.org, books on Clojure, blogs and other sources unless you are the primary author of them and understand the implications.

Contributors Policy

If you are the primary author of a substantial document, you are encouraged to include your name in a ## Contributors section near the end of it, noting that you are the original author. If you have made substantial contributions to an existing document, you might add your name to the ## Contributors section.

If you have at least one non-trivial (e.g. not just typo fixes) pull request merged, you can ask to be added to the repository as a collaborator. We still encourage contributors to use pull requests for content review and discussions for new content, but you will be able to push small improvements directly.

GitHub contributors page lists key contributors to the project.

License

All the content is distributed under the CC BY 3.0 license and are copyright their respective primary author(s).