Introduction to Programming in Go - Short Review

I don’t often impulse buy technical books. They cost too much and consume too much shelf space to be purchased frivolously but when it’s 1.95 for a Kindle book on Go and I’m stuck miles from home it seemed like a good idea.

An Introduction to Programming in Go is a well written guide to your first hour in Go. While you can probably find coverage of the same material on the web, having it all nicely curated in one place is worth the money for someone like me who just wants a little taster and overview. The book covers all the language basics, types, variables, data structures, pointers, structs and, most interesting to me, the native concurrency methods.

While I personally don’t have an immediate use for Go, at $WORK we have a couple of projects written in it so being able to understand the basics from such a quick read is a lovely thing. I can see myself re-reading this little book each time I’m called on to work with a Go based team as a terse refresher.

This book won’t teach you everything you need to know about Go in its slender 166 pages but it does provide a nice, quick peek at Go code and its more immediately useful standard library. For people with no Go exposure I’d give this book 7/10