Learning Go

A few months ago I decided that Go was a language that I wanted to learn. Step one was to find a local Go user group: there's no subsitute for discussing the quirks of a new language with other people. The group I joined has a mix of people that are using Go as part of their daily work, along with those like me who are just trying to pick up the language.

Step two was to download the distribution. It comes with a webserver that appears to have the entire golang.org website, or at least all of the documentation and wiki pages. That's useful, as most of my time for learning is (was) while riding the train. I'm not entirely certain that I like running a server in order to browse documentation — no, actually I'm certain that I don't — but it seems to be the way the world is moving.

Step three was to download the Go Tour (also available online). This is, without question, the best tutorial that I've ever used. It reduces the language to about 60 bite-size pieces, with an example program for each, and includes a service that lets you run those programs from within the page. It's not quite a REPL, but it's close (the online Go Playground, is the program runner without the tutorial).

As a teaching tool, the Tour is nice in that you can easily page up and down between lessons. This is particularly useful when doing one of the exercises, where you're presented with an empty function and have to remember syntax. The only problem with the Tour is that it doesn't save the programs in local storage: when you close your browser window, your work is gone.

The next few posts will give my initial impressions of Go, including some of the places that I think bugs will lurk. I'm also thinking of a somewhat more substantial program to give me a real sense of how the language works.