I think the writing style is too fluffy, but I realize some people like that. The true sin of this book is that it actually starts by teaching the reader Emacs, not Clojure. That's a huge distraction for a beginner who is probably coming from VSCode these days.

Seconded. I'm also a big fan of Aphyr's "Clojure from the ground up" series: https://aphyr.com/posts/301-clojure-from-the-ground-up-welco...

Agreed. Perhaps using VSCode with the Calva plugin if the reader has no previous experience with Emacs.