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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

If you like this sort of thing, here are some others in a similar humorous style for other languages.

1. Kaufman, Roger. A FORTRAN Coloring Book (probably the first funny programming book -- from 1978).

2. Lipovača, Miran. Learn You A Haskell for Great Good.

3. Hebert, Fred. Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good (inspired by the Haskell book).

4. Felleisen, Matthias. Realm of Racket (basically Land of Lisp for Racket. Oddly, nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure" or "Society of Scheme" yet.)

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Starting Forth / Thinking Forth from Brodie are great too

They are now freely downloadable: http://www.exemark.com/FORTH/StartingFORTHfromForthWebsitev9... http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/

> nobody's done a "Commonwealth of Clojure"

Higginbotham, Daniel. Clojure for the Brave and True.

https://www.braveclojure.com/

I really loved the part where Lady Gaga explained multitasking.

I loved Land of Lisp, but found Clojure for the Brave and True annoying. To me, LoL is hilarious, while CftBaT tries to be funny, but fails.

Hmmm I think I remember a few failed jokes but I found the actual coverage of the language pretty good, wdyt? I guess for a book like this you are not really looking for a comedy best seller, no? :-)

I guess the thing is that when an attempt at humor fails, which is obviously subjective, it starts to distract from the content.

I agree it is subjective. I actually open Clojure for The Brave and True book from now and then just because I find so much of it truly hilarious. The hilarity is what really helped me get Clojure. I also like the Land of Lisp and find it funny as well.

I suspect this is one of the best books on Clojure out there ("suspect": I'm working through a couple of different ones on and off).

Clojure Applied (Alex Miller) or Programming Clojure 3rd Ed (Alex Miller / Stuart Halloway) would be my picks but I don't know how beginner friendly they are.

They're certainly not as colourful as brave but found the pace and coverage good

Realm of Racket is such a strange book. It feels like they tried really hard to follow LOL or "why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby" aesthetics/structure, with mixed results.

Also, I know this is silly but I remember the book followed this guy who was supposed to be "the hero" that was always sad or concerned, or frowning, in every picture, right on to the end of the book (or so I remember it...). I know it is silly but that put me down :-p

Only from skimming the first few pages of "Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby" I wanted to learn Ruby.

I didn't checked recently, but I found bizarre (maybe not the right word) how the author one day decided to disappear and nuke his Internet presence.

https://poignant.guide/

I love this guide! A friend showed it to me and I still quote lines from it often. I like the bit about "our own recliners", I tell my friend that someday him and I will have our own recliners. Another line I vaguely remember is when he's made a backpack for a bug out of a leaf. I think he puts a skittle and a battery in there and then says "that should last him". The writing style is great.

Yes, that was interesting. I read about it at the time (I was doing Ruby around then). Another one on the same lines was Mark Pilgrim (author of Dive into Python and similarly-named books for Python 3 and HTML 5, IIRC).

Why’s Poignant Guide To Ruby is also in this vein, though a bit weirder.

_why's book is what got me into programming. I still love Ruby, even though I've only had single digit months where I was able to program professionally in it

1+ for “commonwealth of Clojure”—but shouldn’t there be a j somewhere in that? Cjommonwealth? (Pronounce j like y and it kinda works.)

LYAH is a great introduction for Haskell in my opinion. It helps make an intimidating language more approachable. And once you see that it's not all that intimidating, it's easy to find resources for yourself and keep learning Haskell.

The Haskell IRC community is a great resource as well, and probably one of the friendliest around. (#haskell on freenode)

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