Fastest way to start with Clojure (besides the online REPL at http://tryclj.com) is to get yourself leiningen (the widely used build tool for clojure projects under: http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) and a plugin/mode for your editor of choice, do "lein new <your project name>" and start a REPL via "lein repl" to get working.
Re:Clojure 1.5.0 RC 1 released
by kybernetyk on Sunday December 23, 2012 @05:18AM
(#4959142)
> Having a simple but powerful REPL environment like IPython would be fantastic.
Download and install leiningen (http://leiningen.org) and then you can start up a repl with 'lein repl'.
I wrote a little web app using clojure and when it came to deployment I was really positively surprised:
1) 'lein ring uberwar'
2) copy resulting war file into your tomcat webapps directory
3) you're done
There's also a heroku plugin if you don't like hosting yourself.
Without leiningen clojure is just unusable though. You have to mess with classpathes and wrapping java command line calls in boilerplate.
Making Clojure easier for newcomers would be a boon - I've battled with setup and configuration each time I've tried to use Clojure. Having a simple but powerful REPL environment like IPython would be fantastic.