Why other Lisp tutorials don't teach -> is, firstly, that other Lisp's don't have that, except as some add-on library feature. Secondly, it's a syntactic sugar that has quite a bit going on under the hood: implicit parameters, a lambda function being expressed as #(+ % 2) with this % thingy, and return values of forms being passed as arguments to other forms that are not syntactically enclosed. You have to understand that (range 10) is just called normally, but then its return value becomes an extra invisible argument to the (map ...) form.
Newcomers should learn the underlying ordinary evaluation first.
Newcomers should learn the underlying ordinary evaluation first.