Get Go-ing

I’ve mentioned previously that I was quite late to the Ruby party. It was still going strong, but the huge wave of excitement had largely peaked. Ruby remains my go-to language and I still love writing Ruby, it still gives me joy, but it’s lost a lot of hype. That’s actually a good thing, really, and Jeff Atwood explains it more succulently than I can. The crux of it is this:

Ruby isn’t cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It’s not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn’t cool, it’s just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I’m thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing.

(emphasis mine)

Of course, I’m simultaneously in this camp, while also chasing one of the next shiny things, which for me is Go.

Learning Go

I didn’t want to be late to the next party. Maybe driven by some career survival instinct to stay relevant and hirable, or simply just driven by ego to be doing the next cool thing1, regardless, I wanted to get going with Go.

Below are some resources that I’ve found very helpful in getting up to speed and functional with Go:

Getting oriented on golang.org:

Diving in

  • Go By Example – An excellent guide from @mmcgrana that will walk you through Go with clear explanations and working code samples
  • Golang.org: A Tour of Go – a tour of Go from the golang site. I found it less approachable than Go By Example, I but should note that it’s received an update and appears to be restructured

Reference / Books

  • Golang.org: Effective Go – a required reading, but in my opinion not until you’ve got the basics down and have written some code
  • Golang.org: Packages – documentation for all the standard library. You will get to know this site very well
  • Golang-book – a free book online with more good reference / explanations
  • Go Bootcamp – another free book online
  • github.com/golang/go/wiki – a wiki on the GitHub page for golang/go with further reading

  1. Ruby jobs are not short in supply and I don’t suspect will be any time soon, so we’ll assume ego. 

@ctshryock

About

My name is Clint Shryock. I develop things in Go and Ruby. I live in central Missouri, where the weather is beautiful 4 months of the year.
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