Reviews and Comments

I'm feeling a bit tired of the Heresy era right now. And I'm also currently playing Rogue Trader, which takes place in the 41st millennium. So I decided to switch to some novels from that era for the time being.

Another great book by Alex Edwards. Like "Let's Go", it shows concepts of web development with Go by slowly implementing an app throughout the book. In contrast to "Let's Go", the focus is on a JSON API instead of a web app this time.

Another solid book, although I must admit I'm never a fan of plots, schemes and other assorted cloak-and-dagger stuff. But in this book, the reader is rewarded with a new (for the Heresy books) point of view, namely the Imperial Army. Most of the protagonists in this book aren't Astartes, they're human soldiers of the army, and the leader gets a glimpse into their lives.

And while I don't like cloak-and-dagger too much, I can appreciate what the author did here: The Alpha legion is supposed to be very clandestine and secretive. Introducing them not from the PoV of one of their captains but from the PoV of external observers, namely the army, allows the author to keep this aura of secrecy intact. It was nicely done.

This book makes for an excellent second Golang book. I read "Learning Go" as an introduction to Go, but my main goal was to use Go for my web programming needs. So for my second book, I looked around for something with a light web dev introduction with Go. And I found "Let's Go". It covers all of the basics for delivering static HTML. While it covers a lot, from templating to databases and user management, the one major omission is any use of Javascript. But that's fine with me, to be honest. Everything else is covered really well, building a small web app for pasting text snippets.

I especially enjoyed the fact that Alex Edwards chose to not go with one of the big Golang web frameworks. He's instead using mostly the Golang standard library. But he also doesn't shy away from using libraries for targeted tasks, like HTML form parsing or session management. Another great thing was that it also showed the practical applications of all the syntax and approaches presented in "Learning Go" in a "real" project.

Overall a great book, and well worth the price.

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.