Why I wrote a book on Go programming

Vladimir Vivien
Learning the Go Programming Language
2 min readJan 2, 2017

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Go has a large and active online community, several conferences around the globe yearly, countless blogs and videos on the subject. The language has one of the better-documented standard library and, as if that was not enough, there is a rowing list published books on Go programming.

So do we need need more text on Go? I can answer that question by answering why I wrote a book on Go.

Getting into Go

Getting started with Go is simple, fast, and well documented. However, “getting into” Go can be more challenging, especially for newcomers from other languages. My first attempt at Go failed (admittedly that was 3+ years ago, way before this explosion of resources). Even after reading the prescribed documentations and going through the tutorials, there was a gap in understanding of the language, driven by my own biases from previous programming experiences. Months later I returned to Go. This time I read the language specs, I read more blogs, watch tons of videos, and searched the web for any discussion that provided design motivations and in-depth explanations of the language.

I spent the last 1.5 yrs writing Learning Go Programming because I wanted to make it easier for newcomers to get into the language. I have attempted to write the book I would have like to have read when I was starting out with Go. It distills the language specs, the documentations, the blogs, the videos, slides, and my own experiences of writing Go into content that carefully provides the right amount of depth and insights to help you understand the language and its design.

I hope that you enjoy it (constructive criticism, also welcome).

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