I have the book, and I do not like it. I read it while learning, and returned to it only to realize what it did wrong, and why I learned nothing from it.
It saddens me to see this post.
Having been a novice programmer in the past, as a natural starting point, trying to start with clojure as a blank slate using this book as an introduction was also ineffective. When I tried to read the book and approach clojure on its own terms, as if I knew nothing and would not be aided by prior experience, the book's attempts at cuteness were tangential and distracting. It's examples did not build on each other.
This was one of the first books on the book shelf at the book store that I noticed as being specifically about clojure. After getting nothing out of the book, I went elsewhere and searched other books that gave me the information that I needed.
After gaining further awareness of the language, and establishing competancy through the use of other resources, I revisited the book, to figure out why it didn't help me.
One of the books that did bootstrap my core concepts was:
https://pragprog.com/book/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-we...
In the first sentence it plainly states clojure is a lisp. In its forty pages on clojure, that book gave me most of what this book did not provide in 300 pages.
Knowing now that clojure is a lisp, I went and got Land of Lisp:
That is an example of a book with jokes that are clever and informative. I was able to approach lisp on its own terms in isolation with that book. That book's table of contents are properly structured for reference, rather than as a framework for layered jokes.
Only after I was able to bootstrap the fundamentals of lisp, and drawn parallels with java, was I able to see where this book goes wrong. It is not written for new or non developers. It is not written for developers familiar with other languages.
It's written for people who already know clojure, and might applreciate the cute inside jokes it makes, that you might get if you already know clojure. I don't envision anyone else gaining anything from it.
New developers are not informed of why data structures are useful and when. Things like primitive data types (booleans, integers, characters, strings) are not highlighted as foundational building blocks. Execution scoping is not properly addressed. Project structure and source code files trees, and namespacing are poorly explained. An entire chapter on emacs is inadequate for practical learning, and actual essentials for handling lisp or clojure, within an editor like emacs is beyond the scope of the book.
Based on these details, I have no use for the book as a reference manual, and I also cannot recommend it as starting point for first time programmers, or even inexperienced programmers searching for more learning exercises.
I can't even recommend it to other clojure developers for the jokes, because even the jokes are not funny.
As of the Jokes, it seems this is a matter of taste. I quite liked the jokes.
Concerning the book "Land of Lisp" I wished Conrad Barski had used Clojure instead of Common Lisp.