Mastering Go: Writing Golang production applications using Network Libraries, deep concurrency, advanced Go data structures and cloud-native techniques
This book not only goes into great depth on Go features usually taken for granted, but also explains how to use an improved understanding of Go internals to optimize Go code, use all Go data types and data structures in new and unexpected ways, and understand how to write Go systems projects, do OS-level coding and build Go network applications.
I like this book. I really do. I started learning Go reading "The Go Programming Language" which one can view as Go's K&R. But like not everyone can learn from K&R, the same holds for TGPL too. This is the gap that this book closes. You cannot be scared. You can finish the Tour of Go in Golang's web site and then start the book.
Information presented in the book is in small pieces. That is the author's style if you've also read his other book. It helps. You can read it in coffee breaks and write a few lines of the examples, compile, run, test and be happy with the result. You become immediately productive once you've mastered the concepts of the language. By that I do not mean that you magically become a Go expert programmer, but with the book you get a faster pace on the subject that matters to you. You can dive right into it as a junior Go programmer within the first week. Because the presentation style that allows for you to study in small chunks helps you with that. You will never stop halfway through a section because the break is over. You will never type lots of lines before you make an example work.
How do you eat an elephant? By eating one bit at a time. The same with Mastering Go. You master it one section at a time. That is the gift of the book.
Disclaimer: I was gifted the book by the author and the publisher as I relentlessly proof-read and corrected typing errors in his other book.
I've been reading this for months, off-and-on, because I'd been writing some Go stuff and finding it pretty straightforward (and almost nostalgic) but being not really comfortable with my strategies for structuring larger apps with its blend of pseudo-OO interfaces and not-quite-functional-but-also-highly-mutable attitude.
But, like a lot of Packt books, this consists primarily of the author taking some aspect of the topic, writing an isolated chapter on it that's about at the level of what you get from the docs, and not really adding much in the way of insight. This is almost at a cargo cult level at this point.
For instance, you don't want to (in your programming book) put up a wall of code the reader has to struggle through (unless it's just meant to be a full listing you've already covered). So what you do is break up the code bit-by-bit and explain the significance each part. You can even skip parts of the code if they're boilerplate or already covered.
This book presents the entire code every time I think, but then breaks it up this way:
This shows the first part of the code The next few lines show the next section of the code And here's the last section of the code
And in a lot of cases, that's all the explanation there is. Sometimes it's because that's all that's needed and others it's probably due to word counts or page quotas or something related to the mechanical process of publishing. But is extraordinarily unenlightening.
The English is otherwise passable (unlike some other Packt books I've read recently) but the number of times I went to the official docs for clarification was very high.
Look, here's the thing: Official docs tend to be very dry and deal with the mechanics of things. You get a book like this to tell you why things are done a certain way, and what problems they might solve. Pointing out that Go has three different data structures in its standard library, and then running through some already fairly intuitive interfaces is not very helpful. We code to solve problems: When you give me an example of a Heap, tell me what problem I might uniquely solve with it.
The interface stuff is especially bad, with interfaces called A and B and instances that are also one letter and demonstrate on a basic level a very minor "this is how you'd do something trivial" but no real depth.
At one point, the author says, hey, if you want to design something OO, you're out of luck. Maybe go use Python. (Another weird side note, we learn he doesn't like Java, apparently, so he wouldn't recommend it. Newsflash: A lot of people don't like Java and that has very little bearing on whether or not it's useful to learn.)
I can only assume the economics of writing tech books in the 21st century is so bad, publishing houses are just luring whomever they can convince to throw words on a page, not really editing either on a language or tech level, and just churning stuff out on every conceivable topic figuring to sucker guys like me into their $10/month plans.
A large semi-organized cookbook of different things you can do with Go. Not all the samples are of equal quality (some crash, other just look awful). Overall I can’t even say what is the target audience of this book.
Good examples and explanation. I also like exercises. I would not recommend this book for beginners. I use this book more for expanding Go knowledge and for looking at examples.
Just a very good overview of Go language capabilities. Nothing more, nothing less... Go appears quite easy to start and it is very strong in regards to server-side programming.
Fine book, but the title is deceiving. It is project focused, and you can learn while building something together. But you won’t be mastering go with it.