Learning Go - Meier's Bookwyrm

No cover — Jon Bodner: Learning Go (2024, O'Reilly Media, Incorporated)

English language

Published 2024 by O'Reilly Media, Incorporated.

ISBN:: 978-1-0981-3929-2

Go is rapidly becoming the preferred language for building web services. While there are plenty of tutorials available that teach Go's syntax to developers with experience in other programming languages, tutorials aren't enough. They don't teach Go's idioms, so developers end up recreating patterns that don't make sense in a Go context. This practical guide provides the essential background you need to write clear and idiomatic Go.

No matter your level of experience, you'll learn how to think like a Go developer. Author Jon Bodner introduces the design patterns experienced Go developers have adopted and explores the rationale for using them. You'll also get a preview of Go's upcoming generics support and how it fits into the language.

Go is rapidly becoming the preferred language for building web services. While there are plenty of tutorials available that teach Go's syntax to developers with experience in other programming languages, tutorials aren't enough. They don't teach Go's idioms, so developers end up recreating patterns that don't make sense in a Go context. This practical guide provides the essential background you need to write clear and idiomatic Go.

No matter your level of experience, you'll learn how to think like a Go developer. Author Jon Bodner introduces the design patterns experienced Go developers have adopted and explores the rationale for using them. You'll also get a preview of Go's upcoming generics support and how it fits into the language.

3 editions

Michael reviewed Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming by Jon Bodner

Reviewing "Learning Go" as an experienced programmer new to Go

4 stars

It's a really good book for getting into Golang. One caveat before I continue: I went into this with a pretty broad background in programming, so I'm not sure how well the book would work for a programming beginner.

First of all: The book does provide what it says on the tin. There's quite some discussion of how to write idiomatic Go in the book, which I like. I don't have problems taking up new syntax for a language, but in the past I've found that all too many books concentrate only on syntax and standard library, but not on what idiomatic code for the language looks like.

What I was positively surprised about while working through the book was that the Go language designers succeeded: They produced a modern, useful programming language that's pretty simple. Go feels quite a lot like when I learned C for the …

It's a really good book for getting into Golang. One caveat before I continue: I went into this with a pretty broad background in programming, so I'm not sure how well the book would work for a programming beginner.

First of all: The book does provide what it says on the tin. There's quite some discussion of how to write idiomatic Go in the book, which I like. I don't have problems taking up new syntax for a language, but in the past I've found that all too many books concentrate only on syntax and standard library, but not on what idiomatic code for the language looks like.

What I was positively surprised about while working through the book was that the Go language designers succeeded: They produced a modern, useful programming language that's pretty simple. Go feels quite a lot like when I learned C for the first time, just with fewer footguns.

The book also provides exercises for each chapter, and the solutions are freely available on GitHub. I always like that, as it allows me to do a quick check to see whether I went down the completely wrong path. But, there were a bit too few exercises for my taste. In some chapters, the exercises didn't cover all of the topics discussed in the chapter.