Eric Rochester - Clojure data analysis cookbook

Eric Rochester enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with his wife and kids. When he's not doing those things, he programs in a variety of languages and platforms, including websites and systems in Python and libraries for linguistics and statistics in C#. Currently, he's exploring functional programming languages, including Clojure and Haskell. He works at the Scholars' Lab in the library at the University of Virginia, helping humanities professors and graduate students realize their digitally informed research agendas.

I'd like to thank everyone. My technical reviewersJan Borgelin, Tom Faulhaber, Charles Norton, and Miki Tebekaproved invaluable. Also, thank you to the editorial staff at Packt Publishing. This book is much stronger for all of their feedbacks, and any remaining deficiencies are mine alone.

Thank you to Bethany Nowviskie and Wayne Graham. They've made the Scholars' Lab a great place to work, with interesting projects, as well as space to explore our own interests.

And especially I would like to thank Jackie and Melina. They've been exceptionally patient and supportive while I worked on this project. Without them, it wouldn't be worth it.

Jan Borgelin is a technology geek with over 10 years of professional software development experience. Having worked in diverse positions in the field of enterprise software, he currently works as a CEO and Senior Consultant for BA Group Ltd., an IT consultancy based in Finland. For the past 2 years, he has been more actively involved in functional programming and as part of that has become interested in Clojure among other things.

I would like to thank my family and our employees for tolerating my excitement about the book throughout the review process.

Thomas A. Faulhaber, Jr. , is principal of Infolace (www.infolace.com), a San Francisco-based consultancy. Infolace helps clients from startups to global brands turn raw data into information and information into action. Throughout his career, he has developed systems for high-performance TCP/IP, large-scale scientific visualization, energy trading, and many more.

He has been a contributor to, and user of, Clojure and Incanter since their earliest days. The power of Clojure and its ecosystem (of both code and people) is an important "magic bullet" in Tom's practice.

Charles Norton has over 25 years of programming experience, ranging from factory automation applications and firmware to network middleware, and is currently a programmer and application specialist for a Greater Boston municipality. He maintains and develops a collection of software applications that support finances, health insurance, and water utility administration. These systems are implemented in several languages, including Clojure.

Miki Tebeka has been shipping software for more than 10 years. He has developed a wide variety of products from assemblers and linkers to news trading systems to cloud infrastructures. He currently works at Adconion where he shuffles through more than 6 billion monthly events. In his free time, he is active in several open source communities.

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Preface

Data's everywhere! And, as it has become more pervasive, our desire to use it has grown just as quickly. A lot hides in data: potential sales, users' browsing patterns, demographic information, and many, many more things. There are insights we could gain and decisions we could make better, if only we could find out what's in our data.

This book will help with that.

The programming language Clojure will help us. Clojure was first released in 2007 by Rich Hickey. It's a member of the lisp family of languages, and it has the strengths and flexibility that they provide. It's also functional, so Clojure programs are easy to reason with. And, it has amazing features for working concurrently and in parallel. All of these can help us as we analyze data while keeping things simple and fast.

Clojure's usefulness for data analysis is further improved by a number of strong libraries. Incanter provides a practical environment for working with data and performing statistical analysis. Cascalog is an easy-to-use wrapper over Hadoop and Cascading. Finally, when we're ready to publish our results, ClojureScript, an implementation of Clojure that generates JavaScript, can help us to visualize our data in an effective and persuasive way.