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Discussion on: Can you recommend a book for practical learning of Go?

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bitfield profile image
John Arundel

Well, I completely agree with you that a good programming book should both inspire, and require, the reader to do some programming herself. That's why I'm writing the 'For the Love of Go' series, which does exactly that. In book 1, we build a calculator package, test-first, with simple challenges for beginners and much more demanding ones for experienced Gophers. In book 2, we build an online bookstore app, with the same mix of easy-to-difficult problems to solve. Forthcoming titles will cover deployment to different platforms with Go.

You can see some sample pages on the product page for each book here:

For the Love of Go

All the exercises are also available for free online, in GitHub repos:

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Yannick Rehberger

Thank you for the comment. I love the test driven approach. Do the books build on each other in terms of content? Because I am surprised that variables are explained in the second book. Also, the books are quite thin, which is great and nice when you focus on a topic. Do you reference online resources for further reading if somebody wants to study a go concept more in depth?

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John Arundel

Yes, it's always a problem when trying to teach something like Go: what do you teach first? I've deliberately focused on tests for the first book, which surprises a lot of people, and in book 2 we get thoroughly into variables and data types (structs and slices are particularly important). Yes, there are lots of links to further reading online and code challenges for people who want to push themselves beyond the basics!