The Go Programming Language

I was fortunate to receive a review copy of The Go Programming Language by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan. The following is my review of this book based on my limited experience with Golang.

I’m new to Go. I’ve only been through the excellent Tour of Go. This Tour gives you a great hands on trial of Go but leaves out some of the more complex topics that are covered by Donovan and Kernighan’s book. I’ve made it through Chapter 5 which covers functions in detail. The book is well written and fairly easy to read but the subject matter can get quite dense at times. It takes dedication to read and may require you to look up concepts or terminology.

There are plenty of examples and exercises in each section. I really enjoyed seeing the use of the graphics and API early on in the book. There is an entire section dedicated to building an API to return images based on the API calls you built. Really slick. I’m looking forward to more examples further on in the book. I had hoped to have completed the entire book before writing the review but it has been slow going with all these exercises and examples.

The short version of this review is I highly recommend this book. Hopefully we’ll see some more Go projects in my future so I can stretch these new muscles.