Go Programming Language, The (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

This is a very thorough introduction to Go. The author's code examples are available on Github which spares you the trouble of retyping them. It' s probably best for someone with some programming experience as in the interests of brevity some low-level features and common programming shortcuts are demonstrated but not explained. However Go is much-better documented than other languages I've used so there's ample resources on the web to help you out with the small details. As a small aside, it's actually nice to have a book that announces what you're up to if you work in co-working spaces or cafes. Sometimes another engineer will see the book cover and let you know that they're available to answer your questions. Well, this happened to me once anyway.

I like GO because It implements cleanly such modern features as abstract data type, data encapsulation, object composition, interface, package, CSP model (Tony Hoare) concurrent programing, multi-value-return function, deferred function calls, garbage collection, exporting names by capitalization, simple but effective exception handling and memory model. It is a static type language. Higher abstract data types such as map (hash table), string, array and slice are built in to simplify memory management. Its syntax is succinct (only 25 keywords). Yet using it correctly can lead to powerful program constructs. Little redundancies are built into the language. As such, there are not many alternate ways to do one thing which leads to codes that are easy to understand and maintain. The designers deliberately choose to implement features to support object composition instead of inheritance, to handle exception where it happens instead of the throw and catch clauses, to use simple "struct literals" to initialize abstract data type instead of constructor functions, and "type" expression to help users consistently define user types, interface (abstract) type as a standard protocols to call different concrete-objects methods (the correct way to implement polymorphism). It does not have default arithmetic type conversion, and function name overloading, which together with class inheritance (function overwrite), constructor functions, throw-and-catch exception handling are the sources of needlessly programing complexity. Importantly, both procedure (functions and data structures) and object-oriented (objects and methods) methodologies can be used. There are just enough features that help make GO a pleasant language to write. All features are careful designed to work well together which facilitate a program model that is quite powerful, but simple to learn, reason, write, and support.The book is well written by a GO expert programmer and a computer pioneer and noted author of programing books. Concepts are coherently and timely presented. Examples are usually not code fragments, but complete programs which can be compiled and run. Programs of complex concepts are presented in multiple versions from simpler to more elaborated ones. Like the efficient design of GO, the book is never overwritten. It is the most enjoyable programing book I have read in a long while.

This book is not only one of the best books I've read on Go, but also one of the best programming books I've read in general. It is easy to understand and well edited. I thought the first chapter was really entertaining, explaining the origins of go (Plan 9, etc.), and the pacing from there is really great for my tastes. It's not overly verbose (there are a few sentences that are short but pack a punch that I re-read a few times just to make sure I understood them) and it's not trying to teach you how to program.I am a gopher by way of .NET Core (among others), and this helped me immensely. It explains *why* golang is the way it is as well as nearly all aspects of the language. I have been programming professionally for > 15 years but I became a golang dev in a "trial by fire" manner. I took over a full-stack Angular/go project that was written by a brand new developer, so there were a ton of terrible practices / bugs and it was already in production (as it turns out, in the real world things are sometimes less than ideal!). I read the docs, did the "Tour of Go" (which is really nice, by the way) and "Go by Example" (also recommend), and hit the ground running. Go is a simple language to learn, so I was able to squash bugs and ship new features immediately; but this book really helped flesh out the gaps in my knowledge.If you have some experience programming but are new to Go (or want to dig deeper), this is the one to get. If you are new to programming, I would approach this with some trepidation. I don't think it's completely out of the question for a brand new programmer, but you might have to do some googling along the way to help you with concepts that maybe aren't explained in detail in this book because it's assumed they are already known.