Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century (Developer''s Library) [Paperback]

This is a resoundingly thorough walkthrough of the Go language and all of its features and idioms. Despite being a ground up introduction, the book appears to be written with the assumption of the reader having some basic programming experience; so while it begins with the usual foundational explanations of types and syntax, the wording is refreshingly precise, dense and informative and continues this way going forward. Most who don't have a need to be talked down to but still would appreciate clear writing and a thorough detailing of the language from the bottom up would find this book is really well-suited.

While the book assumes familiarity with programming in general it is not at all withholding of examples or clarification, and indeed it errs on the side of caution in presenting multiple demonstrations of ideas before moving on to the next hurdle. Examples abound throughout, in fact nearly all chapters tend to have a long block of demonstrations at their end. To some degree my attention started to wander sometimes during these parts. At times their length became a little exhausting as even when I had felt I'd already gotten the idea I tended to pore through the examples under the logic that if it was necessary to include them they must be hiding some subtle nuances I hadn't picked up on earlier, but for the most part that wasn't so. The example sections are simply available to reinforce and clarify ideas for anyone who didn't get them in the first pass. There seemed to be a glut of them but it's unreasonable to fault the author for being thorough and in places I did find them helpful, however the examples are supplemental, and in retrospect it's okay to move ahead if you feel you've understood a chapter by the time you've reached them. By modern standards Go is a very simple language, so it's not a surprise the content of a ~500 page book would have a slight bias toward examples and case studies.

Though, while the nod to thoroughness is appreciated, there is sometimes an overwhelming sense parts of the book could have been shorter. In general the the first 140 pages are devoted to an introduction and the language's primitive types. About 60 pages for numbers and strings in particular seems excessive. Unicode is interesting and subtle, and slices are surely important, but I think most have dealt with vectors, text, maps and numbers enough that this level of detail might be over the top for a book that's mostly instructional in nature. Sometimes it gives the impression Go's spartan approach to selecting features led to certain sections of the book being a little over-bearing for lack of more difficult things to cover.

Lastly, in some places the organization of the book befuddles me. This is absolutely the first time I've made it 144 pages into a book on a computer language before being formally introduced to an if statement. The book obviously couldn't avoid them up to this point and they shouldn't blindside anyone, but if a reader is expected to already know something or understand it inductively, why even bother introducing it 140 pages later? 'if' is a rhetorical example, Go's for loops, switch statements and functions do in fact have their own idiosyncrasies and it's difficult to understand the sense in delaying introducing them. This is so glaringly conspicuous that it couldn't have happened on accident, but the reasoning escapes me. Once again, if it somehow isn't important enough to put at the front of the book before you've been using it for four chapters, why bother?

Those qualms aside it'd probably be best not to end on a negative note. Altogether, this is a thorough book that fulfilled it's purpose in granting me a solid grounding in the language and I'd recommend it nearly to anyone without caveats. Go is an excellent language and this is an excellent place to start.