I've been playing with 4clojure[1] in my off time for weeks, and it's been a great introduction to the language, although it obviously doesn't help with learning how to package and deploy an application or service. How did you make the first steps from playing around in the REPL to writing production code?

[1] http://www.4clojure.com/

Have you seen Leiningen[1]? It pretty much solves packaging and deploying problem. Awesome tool.

Also if you're into Web development, I can recommend playing with Noir[2] framework and Korma[3] for SQL abstraction. Heroku also support deploying Clojure apps out of the box, so you can easily use a free tier to get something out there.

[1] https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

[2] http://webnoir.org/

[3] http://sqlkorma.org/

I've got a question about Noir. Is it necessary for me to write HTML with Clojure, or can I separate it and write plain HTML somehow? Writing HTML in the middle of my Clojure code doesn't appeal to me coming from a MVC background...

https://github.com/cgrand/enlive

https://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial/