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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.