Ok, but the site's first suggestion is to use Leiningen to install the koans. It links to a generic Leiningen installation page, but then doesn't tell you how to use it to install the koans.

Unless they expect the new user to spend significant time learning about that tool before moving on to their koans, I think it'd really be much better to have a short how-to for that.

Politely, I'd advise the opposite.

Learn Leiningen- not only because it makes Clojure simple and pleasurable to use, but because it'd be a fantastic tool no matter what language it was part of.

Project skeletons (new new), command line scripting (via lein exec), deployment, the wonderful 'lein ring server', custom plugins... and for those who just want to get their feet wet, 'lein repl' brings the ocean to you.

My initial reaction was to upvote @eccp, based on my experience with leiningen the first time round. Long story short: went around in circles following outdated (but seemingly comprehensive) guides that twisted my mind with hopeless combinations of Ant, Maven, Leiningen, emacs, slime and swank, among others. Basically gave up after a while, but was fortunate to get some encouragement here on HN, and went back in with just leiningen and emacs. I recall that was just the right mix, and as you say, lein repl pretty much brought the ocean to me.

A whole lot of people who try to get started with Clojure without lein never actually get to a repl or runnable project.

If you have lein, you can run `lein repl` which provides awesome tab-completions, documentation, and source for any given function. Pretty handy for beginners I'd say!