Summary: If you’re a Rubyist and you’ve heard some buzz about Clojure, these videos and links will be just for you. Rubyists teaching Clojure, Clojurists introducing Clojure to Ruby programmers, and Rubyists pontificating on Clojure.

Daniel Higginbotham has written a nice “love letter” to Clojure from a Rubyist’s perspective.

Clojure for Ruby Programmers

Stuart Halloway discusses Clojure syntax and semantics, a gentle critique of OO, concurrency primitives in Clojure, and a Clojure/Ruby comparison.

Why a Ruby shop decided to learn Clojure.

clojure is my favorite ruby

Steven Deobald explains Clojure from a Ruby perspective.

A Rubyist in Clojure-land

David Chelimsky shows how working with Clojure has helped him simplify his Ruby code.

You really should know a little bit of Clojure

Ben Orenstein gives a lesson on Clojure to a RubyConf.

Fogus’s theory on why Ruby programmers are attracted to Clojure.

Clojure for Rubyists

A screencast showing how similar the languages can be.

Simplicty Matters

Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, was invited to keynote at Rails Conf back in 2012. Just the fact that he was invited should show how important Clojure’s ideas can be to the Ruby community.

Conclusions

Lots of Rubyists are checking out and learning Clojure. They’re finding stuff they like! Some of them are taking up Clojure professionally, and some are applying the lessons back to their work in Ruby. I recommend the course called LispCast Introduction to Clojure if you’d like to get a deep introduction to what it can be like to program in Clojure. It builds the essential skills you need to be fluent in Lisp syntax and functional thinking. If you want to take it further, the PurelyFunctional.tv Online Mentoring program is designed to help programmers become Clojure professionals. It’s bite-sized videos released regularly, with access to the entire backlog.