A Review Of An Introduction To Programming In Go

Recently I had a chance to write some Go code for the first time in a few years as part of the interview process at CoreOS. The challenge was actually really fun, but so as not to ruin surprise I won’t be talking about what I did during the challenge. Suffice it to say that I had a great experience, and whether or not I get the job at CoreOS I definitely enjoyed the interview process. That said I had such a good time with Go I decided to go looking for a book about it. I found it kind of difficult to find reviews of any of the books so I decided to read a few, and after I was done I thought why not write about it. So this blog post is going to be a review of An Introduction to Programming in Go by Caleb Doxsey. The book is interesting. Chapters 1-5 are for true beginners. You should only really read them if you have never programmed in your life before. They are the standard how to do you do the basics of programming. Interestingly I don’t think I would suggest this part of the book for beginners. Go requires a bit of a set up and it’s a compiled language. If you are really beginning I would suggest using the Go interactive walk through or JavaScript, that way you can focus on just learning the very first steps of programming. After chapter 5 though things get a bit more interesting. The books covers more Go specific functionality. If you don’t have time or an internet connection this is the perfect way to quickly digest a brief overview of the language features and gently introduce the reader to Go idioms. In particular I like the section on next steps. The author points out that you should read the source code to understand the “masters” in order to get better. He also makes the valid point that most nontrivial software is made by teams so learning to be a team player is also important. So while this book is definitely not for Go experts it is worth the quick read if you are just looking to get a brief overview of Go.