I am trying to learn Clojure, which seems a good candidate for a successful LISP. I have no problem with the concepts, but now I would like to start actually doing something.

Here it comes my problem. As I mainly do web stuff, I have been looking into existing frameworks, database libraries, templating libraries and so on. Often these libraries are heavily based on macros.

Now, I like very much the possibility of writing macros to get a simpler syntax than it would be possible otherwise. But it definitely adds another layer of complexity. Let me take an example of a migration in Lobos from a blog post:

(defmigration add-posts-table
  (up [] (create clogdb
           (table :posts (integer :id :primary-key )
             (varchar :title 250)
             (text :content )
             (boolean :status (default false))
             (timestamp :created (default (now)))
             (timestamp :published )
             (integer :author [:refer :authors :id] :not-null))))
  (down [] (drop (table :posts ))))

It is very readable indeed. But it is hard to recognize what the structure is. What does the function timestamp return? Or is it a macro?

Having all this freedom of writing my own syntax means that I have to learn other people's syntax for every library I want to use.

How can I learn to use these components effectively? Am I supposed to learn each small DSL as a black box?