I think the best programming language introdution book I read was the " C programming language book" by Ritchie and Kerningham. What made this book stick in my head was that almost very chapter had a bunch of non-trivial exercises at the end and solving them helped me "deeply" absorb those concepts.

There is a lot of material on Clojure on the web . I own the "Joy of Clojure" as well as "Clojure in Action". They are great for illustrating how great Clojure is ( and it is great no question) but they don't help in deeply absorbing the language as much as the C book did. I wish there were programming exercises based around keys concept of Clojure, much like the C book.

There's lots of Exercise/challenge type resources for clojure online (and, very important, lots of devs doing them): Labrepl, SICP exercises in clojure, project Euler, 99 prolog problems

It's becoming a minor clojure tradition to port things from scheme and CL, e.g. Let over Lambda, Graham's On Lisp, Little schemer, etc.

I would nominate Stuart's dependency mgmt blog entry for this page too:

http://stuartsierra.com/2011/06/01/dependency-management

I was surprised that 4Clojure wasn't mentioned. It's a great little site that poses Clojure problems in easily digestible chunks.

http://www.4clojure.com/

(not that I don't trust them, but why use URL shorteners, bit.ly?)

I'm not the author and obviously don't know for sure, but bit.ly can be a poor man's click tracker. Here are the stats for Rich Hickey's reading list on Amazon: https://bitly.com/hIlovG+

My guess would be that it was built up by several of the team members and they just pasted the links from where they found them, which was probably Twitter.

Sounds like small price to pay for what clojure/core provides.