The Go Programming Language (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) 1st Edition

Pretty good language, VERY good book.

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G.S. Fordham

March 18, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Very good book to get me ready to use Golang.
But not just that: it also helps get people into better coding habits.

Golang is a language based on best practices, and I feel I not only learned a new language this past Summer, but I also learned more about being a good programmer in general.

I would definitely consider using this language in bigger projects in the future, and I have already adopted several practices they listed across other languages I use.

The only things I am not a fan of with this language are the ways it implements public vs private data members and interfaces. I feel the variable name casing should not determine public or private members, because it is less explicit. I also did try a few things out, after reading, and I came across some nasty bugs that were not the easiest to track, due to the implicit interface implementation -- things would go from implementing part of my interface and not another to getting changed and implementing them in reverse, even with only the parts in question being changed; I would much rather say "implements x, y, z", and the compiler would know EXACTLY what I'm trying to do.

One person found this helpful

Inky DigitsTop Contributor: Calligraphy

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The Goldilocks Go Book

October 1, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is the best book (out of 5) that I have read on Go. It's rare to find something in the computer science world that is as accessible and yet as accurate as this work. The examples are excellent and the explanations and instructions clear. Like the language itself it emphasizes clarity and simplicity and abstracts away the right parts, allowing for both accurate understanding and the avoidance of unnecessary complexity.

It also provides the most solid grounding for getting more deeply involved in the more complex areas of the language, which it introduces on a gradient, without getting too thoroughly involved in them.

I have a feeling that It would work reasonably well as a beginner's book, although you might want to make it the second book (or a follow up to the many free tutorials on-line) if you're brand new to programming. It could easily be a first Go book if you've produced even trivial programs in any other language. I highly recommend it to anyone who is not yet fully comfortable reading the language spec and standard library source code. And even if you are happy doing so, you're not going to be doing yourself any harm by reading this work.

17 people found this helpful

This is an awesome book for learning the Go language

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Chris

July 7, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an awesome book for learning the Go language. It covers all the major areas of the language and has a lot of good example code to learn from. At first I was not a fan of how they would go from using full listings to just snippets. But, I started get used to it when I realized that this was helping me to think more about how to actually build a Go package.

My only complaint that I have for the book is that there are sections that feel a little glazed over to me. Topics are just briefly touched on and then they move on. However, this not impede the reader in learning the major portions and important features of the language.

One person found this helpful

The Go Programming Language

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T. McKenna

April 29, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

An excellent treatment of the Go language. Be aware, and the author's state this in the introduction, this is not a text for beginner programmers. If you want to learn Go and are already a competent programmer this book has all you need to get started.

3 people found this helpful

Carefully crafted to make you competent - if you are patient enough give yourself the time to learn

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L. Hall

May 6, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Not a book for the impatient; but if you're a novice, this is the book to trust to take you through from beginner to competence and well on your way to proficiency. I've been a professional C/UNIX developer since the mid-80's and Java and Python for the past 20 years. Don't get me wrong: Go is not a difficult language to learn; but I thought I could pick it up in a few hours. There are serious ground-shattering differences between Go and everything else. Although it borrows liberally from C, Java, and Python - it really is a different approach because the language authors aren't afraid to address the shortcomings made in those and other languages for the sake of conforming with the ideas long held to be "norms".

Case in point: Go builds statically-bound executables. No more runtime dependency woes from mis-matched DLL / .so versions.

Another example: a radically different approach to polymorphism and encapsulation leading to an easier and cleaner object model than any other.

The more I learn about Go, the more I am convinced that it will eventually overtake C/C++ as the defacto standard for system level development - and may even challenge Java and the dynamic languages for business-critical applications.

5 people found this helpful

Only Go book you need to buy

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Varun

December 12, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Every programming language has one book that become the de-facto book. C has K&R and other programming languages has their own. This book is for Go what is K&R for C. If you ever want to buy a Go programming language book, this book should be the one. I have been programming in Go from almost an year and I also find some new tricks from the book. Also I use this book as a reference when I need to brush up some concept.

12 people found this helpful

An excellent guide to learning Go

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B. K. Lau

March 27, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a well-written book that you can read from cover to cover without touching a computer keyboard. The code examples are well-chosen not to be convoluted as to obscure the "wood" or concepts. Java, C/C++ or even Scala programmers would easily feel at home. I think the authors could follow up with another book on "Go Concurrency Patterns" or "Idiomatic Go" or "Effective Go"(ala Scott Meyers's Effective C++ series) to fill in more meat, so to speak.

2 people found this helpful

Great book, but the Kindle edition sucks.

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Most recent customer reviews

Michael Davidson

5 stars for the book, 2 stars for the Kindle edition.

I own both the print and kindle editions of this book.Read more

Published 4 days ago

Amazon Customer

Perfect

The book is in perfect shape!

Published 6 days ago

Cyberflowsurfer

Perfect level of detail from the experts

Being familiar with other languages, such as C and Java, this was the perfect book for learning go. It is concise but also very complete.

Published 20 days ago

Chen C.

I bought this for my son who requested it. He really liked it.

Great book

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Andrea Wilkinson

He really liked it.

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Michael Barnes

Great book. I've read the K&R C book

Great book. I've read the K&R C book, and this book is better. Goes into the history and rationale behind the language.Read more

Published 2 months ago

Samvel

Great book with good examples and exercises.

Published 3 months ago

Jaron Gao

Wonderful book that balances the "why" with the "how".

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Tony Colston