Reviews and Comments

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.

Starting to get back into programming outside of work again, and considering that a lot of the software I'm running in my Homelab is written in Go, I chose to have another look at that.

I'm coming to really enjoy the Horus Heresy, and in particular this installment. It's nice to see the PoV from a different legion, with different characters taking central stage, but still progressing the the same story.

I also enjoyed that we got a peek into Naval warfare in the Warhammer 40k universe. I hope that there's going to be at least a few proper space battles in the future - and ones between actual ships, and not just "okay, and here is the typical Astartes battle, but now aboard a starship during a boarding action".

My favourite among the Horus Heresy books up to now, as the Heresy has now kicked off and the backroom plotting is at least somewhat abetting towards the middle of this one.

Speaking for the overall series, I was a bit worried how having multiple authors writing the same story with the same main characters would turn out, but I have to say that my worries were misplaced. There's no weird "Change of Character" for the main characters between the different authors.

Hands down the best military SciFi I've ever read. This book was the first entry into what has become David Weber's Honorverse. It now encompasses dozens of novels, following both the titular Honor Harrington, a Commander in the Royal Manticoran Navy. The next series follows her through multiple wars to the rank of Fleet Admiral. And not a single one of them is a dud.

The first few books are a bit "Hero Captain/Hero Ship", but not too much, and it gets better later on. Weber later also veers into intergalactic politics, but I wouldn't worry too much: I think what he does show of politics will be palatable to anyone outside the outer extremes of our current political landscape.

The one slight downside of the series as a whole: Towards the end, Weber slowly reveals a massive, Galaxy-spanning conspiracy. And I just hate conspiracies in fiction, but especially ones so mind-bogglingly large as the one Weber has constructed. It's not the kind of "nothing was actually as it seemed" stuff, but it was large enough to make it utterly unbelievable to me. But even the books which contain it still are good enough otherwise for me to slog through.

Also, extra fun is to be had if you're even slightly versed in the Napoleonic Wars.

A great series about Cicero's life in the final days of the Roman Republic. No great surprises if you know history, but Robert Harris knows how to write a history novel. Plus, the entire series is not full of battles or anything. It's rather a historical political thriller about Cicero's attempts to somehow safe the Republic.

I don't have much to say about it, besides that it's a fascinating book to leaf through, just a few pages at a time. The pictures they took of all manner of electronics cut open are interesting to look at, especially if you've ever asked yourself questions like "what does the inside of a USB plug look like?".