I've been through Clojure Programming, The Joy of Clojure, and Programming Clojure, and this is the one I'm recommending. The review hits on many of the reasons, but I also particularly liked how this book dealt with Java interop (not until after a solid foundation had been built around Clojure). I feel that many JVM language books jump too fast into talking about interacting with Java, to the detriment of learning the language in question.
Agreed on all. All three have their strengths and I respect their authors immensely. That said, I have to strongly, strongly recommend newcomers check this book out first, especially if you're coming from another high level language.
Clojure Programming's introduction to what makes lisps lisps as well as the overview of functional programming really sets it apart. The constant comparison to analogs in other languages is also very helpful for coming to grips with Clojure (I'm a casual Clojure hobbyist hacker with slightly more than passing familiarity with the language, and I'm still getting a lot out of every page.)
I don't have a handle on the Python implementation landscape, but the various Rubies all regularly contribute to rubyspec[0] and report on how they're doing. And with rvm[1] it's incredibly easy to test code across rubies. From where I'm sitting, it seems dead simple to find the differences and how they could affect me.
I appreciate this isn't a great example, as python 2.7 isn't a different implementation (ruby 1.8 -> 1.9 is though), but this has been my experience of the way things are documented language-wise.
Not only does Safari work, it uses this user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10"
I only looked at the colors/fonts/seo section, and the quality there is abysmal. Web safe colors shouldn't really be a concern anymore. This was the real winner though: http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?highlight_columns=true CSS compliance for IE 4 on Mac OS 9 isn't pressing anymore.
Perhaps FexEx and UPS could "destroy" the USPS if they didn't have to worry about guaranteeing relatively quick delivery for envelopes from Kirby, WY to Boone, TN for the same inexpensive price as deliveries within a few blocks. The USPS may have laws supporting it, but don't we have expectations of it that far exceed whatever private business could hope to accomplish for profit?
(And, naively, aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?)
What's good about that guarantee? Remember TANSTAAFL. Any time there is a Governmental "free lunch" that most people don't want or use, it's just favoring a few people at the expense of everyone else.
I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly regulations for some (legal) reason.
Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might sound snarky.)
I'm pretty sure he meant "not actually private", in a sense of something like "any organization dependent on the government for survival can be regarded, to some extent, as being effectively a branch of the government".
Of course, by that standard, I'm not sure how many "truly private" companies exist, since it seems to rule out (among others) any company that relies on intellectual property law, including trademark enforcement to prevent bootlegs and cheap imitations.
This isn't copy protection, or even watermarking to identify who's "leaking the source".
Hand-copying text is error-prone, and copies are often made from copies, so there's the chance to reconstruct a "family tree" even after knowledge of what copied from what is lost.
