Introducing Go - just watch YouTube instead

Here is the short version: you’d be better off reading some blog post tutorials and watching a few videos on YouTube.

I picked this up for a potential side project. Go was being hyped as very fast but still with a lot of networking built in, like Python, and that combination appealed to me.

The book itself is a super quick read, and that is about the nicest thing I can say for it. I didn’t find it that useful except for basic syntax and a few of the concepts. The bits that did stick were goroutines and the error handling style, returning errors and nils and dealing with the error path first. For a book promising to teach you to build reliable, scalable programs, that is thin.

The side project never happened and I stuck with Python, so nothing from the book got tested in anger. And maybe part of the problem is me. Learning a programming language by reading might just not be how I learn. But that only strengthens the point: interactive tutorials and videos would have served me better, and they’re free. That is why it only gets 2/5 from me.

Who should read it: honestly, nobody in particular. If you want to pick up Go, start with the free stuff online and see how far it takes you. If you desperately want a paper introduction to Go syntax, this will do the job quickly, but keep your expectations low.