It's hard to want to choose Clojure when it's hard to know where to start. I saw "CojureScript" followed by "ColjureCLR" and just blacked out... I'd like to learn a lisp and I hear clojure is the jam, but seeing that ecosystem exists, while flexible, makes it seem like 90% of it will be learning the tooling and not the language... It just makes me think "hmmm. I need the JVM, might as well use Java... at least it'll be predicatable straightforward, and EXTREMELY well documented, in it's convoluted-ness[1]"
Can someone please sell me, or assure me, otherwise?
[1] Which is also high... I can barely get a JVM project running these days with the plethora highly foreign of build tools, IDE dependencies/configurations, and language settings. Maybe that's just par for the course in 2020 on the JVM, with great power comes great complexit?
There are all sorts of bells and whistles you can choose when it comes to Clojure, but I would recommend you focus in one thing for a start, just plain Clojure with the JVM.
Download a Clojure jar [0], the following command opens the REPL:
$ java -jar clojure-1.10.1.jar
$ java -jar clojure-1.10.1.jar file.clj
Gradual improvements:
* Perhaps install a clojure package [1] instead of using the jar. The jar is nice to understand the main Clojure compiler is at its core just that, a Java program... but the package installed with brew or apt will probably (depending on your OS and how up to date the packages are) also give you a global `clojure` or `clj` command that you will see around in tutorials. Just makes it easier to follow the tutorials!
* Use rebel-readline [2]. Just follow the readme!. It gives you a nice coloured command line REPL with all sorts of cool features, but you don't need to make use of all of them at once. Take your time!
* Choose an editor with good integrations. Obvious choices: VSCode+Calva extension, IntelliJ+Cursive, or Emacs+Cider. The main thing about having a good integration is the instantaneous feedback of sending chunks of code to the REPL, although for a slow start you can do the same just copying and pasting code from the editor to the REPL!
About books: I read 3 or 4 different ones... most books I read were pretty good, some of them are available online for free! Confidence comes from writing lots of code mostly, though, not just reading. I'm not proficient enough yet that I remember the APIs yet so books help to gimme a cohesive roadmap of things to learn.
Suggested little "project": I also found this library [3] that is cool to play a bit with random things to produce some graphical output. It is a wrapper around Processing.
Good luck!
Caveat: there are many ways to do teh same thing. This comes from a focus on libraries over frameworks. Also, the whole JVM API is available to you so for a lot of things you are supposed to just use the Java APIs. Don't bother about wrappers or clojars for a start, just call Java from your clojure. Is fast, fun and easy! :-) Pick one way of doing things and do it for a while... even if it doesn't give you the "fullest of the performance" for any given task, it will be an OK vehicle for you to learn and get familiar with the ecosystem. Classical example: http servers.
0: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/clojure/clojure/1.10.1/
1: https://clojure.org/guides/getting_started
You can't actually use the Clojure jar like this with java -jar as it has a couple of dependent libs (spec.alpha and core.specs.alpha). But getting started with the `clj` tool is just as easy.