Review: Head First Go

Head First Go by Jay McGavren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I will admit that I just skimmed over the web server part. I barely write web backend stuff in Python, I’m not about to do it in Go any time soon. My main goal with this book was to finally learn Go after having heard about it for 2-3 years now. This book turns out to be a very good resource for that. I have no idea how well it would work for someone who’s never programmed before, but for me it’s my 4th or 5th programming language and for most languages the basics are all the same (just like most languages have nouns, verbs, articles, etc) and it’s all about learning the details. I’ve been able to use what I’ve learned here to solve some problems for Advent of Code (a December programming set of puzzles) although I did have to go out to the official documentation a little to figure out things not covered in this book (like regular expressions).

If you need a jumpstart on Go, I heartily recommend this book. It’s written like a hip textbook with with little silly pictures and stuff, but each chapter has a mini project in it to give you a good understanding of how it fits together. This type of learning is best for me when I’m first learning a language vs the programming language books that are more like a reference book. Your mileage may vary based on your learning style.

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