Free Book: An Introduction to Programming in Go

[victork2]

Thanks, I really want to get serious with that language seeing all the praise from people around. I have began to do some small things with it and it feels like a great language ( I love the no makefile idea !)

My only regret is that this format makes it really hard to print in one motion. Could you provide a link for a PDF version?

The animal on the cover looks really hilarious too!

[cdoxsey]

Ok, I added a PDF: http://www.golang-book.com/assets/pdf/gobook.pdf

[trustfundbaby]

yes, please provide a pdf version (free or paid, doesn't matter for me) ... oftentimes authors will make a kindle version of the book for sale on Amazon and forget to put out a pdf.

[netghost]

Another great resource is "A Tour of Go": http://tour.golang.org/

You can also install a local version, I've been working through it, and it's great for fiddling with on the plane.

[spiffworks]

Going through the source code for that tour is also a very good way of getting familiar with the http package and a good introduction to channels.

[nhebb]

@cdoxsey - Nice work, but you might link to an installer that doesn't include a text editor. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of the target audience already has their preferred text editor installed.

Edit: After reading the first few chapters, I made a false assumption. It looks like the book is aimed at people new to computing (or, at least, it doesn't make the assumption that the reader has programmed before).

[akldfgj]

http://golang.org/doc/install

I guess the target audience is programming novices who have never written anything like source code before. Go seems like a strange choice for a first language, being neither foundational (C, Assembler, Scheme/Lisp) nor front-end scripty (JS, Logo, Scratch).

[Mithrandir]

The book is now on Amazon, available for Kindle and in paperback:

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Programming-Go-ebook/d...

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Programming-Caleb-Doxs...

[davidw]

@cdoxsey - you should link the two versions so that people landing on one know that the other format is available.

What did you use to write it? Nice job!

[patrickg]

See also another nice book, which can be downloaded as PDF: http://www.miek.nl/projects/learninggo/index.html

[lsiebert]

I'm kinda bummed that it doesn't cover installing to linux.

Not that installing Linux is difficult, just that A. I suspect we'll see a lot more people on Linux computers, especially in the developing world, and B. beginning programmers should be introduced to the concept of Linux as a programming environment

[georgemcbay]

There's really not much point in covering that in a book beyond pointing you to http://golang.org/doc/install

Go is dead simple to install to Linux via either binary or source. Even building it from scratch on non-standard Linux systems like embedded armv5 systems is easy. Basically if you have a non-broken gcc already, go will build just by invoking one single shell script they provide.

[Evbn]

Does B make sense? First install a new OS before learning what a loop is?

[emehrkay]

Thanks for this. I scanned the document and the language seems pretty straight forward, should be easy to learn. I did a search for classes and object oriented in the document (pdf) and it returned no results.

I did a web search and came up with this https://sites.google.com/site/gopatterns/object-oriented/cla..., maybe the book should reference that somewhere early (maybe not because the intro seems to touch on computer programming in general so I would assume that it was for first-time programmers).

[cdoxsey]

Go doesn't have classes. I agree that it'd make sense to talk about them in a book aimed at C# or Java programmers, but this book is written for people who are new to programming.

[noirman]

Love the format (especially reading from mobile). Thanks for the free book!

[cjdrake]

The TIOBE programming community index rates Go as not being in the top fifty languages used today. That seems strange since it was the "language of the year" in 2009.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

I like Go, and it gets a lot of good press. Is TIOBE not accurately portraying Go's popularity?, or is there some other explanation as to why few people use it?

Sorry, not related to the book (which looks cool, btw).

[akldfgj]

TIOBE has always been a joke, and only even attempt to manage language chatter, not usage. It is based off job boards and internet search trends, and is highly susceptible to homonym confusion, which is especially harmul in the case of "go".

[Gazler]

I really like the structure of this, very readable and a great intro. I have some confusion on http://www.golang-book.com/6

It says:

Go also provides a shorter syntax for creating arrays:

x := [5]float64{ 98, 93, 77, 82, 83 }

We no longer need to specify the type because Go can figure it out. Sometimes arrays like this can get too long to fit on one line, so Go allows you to break it up like this:

However the type is specified as `float64`

[cdoxsey]

I meant you didn't need this:

var x [5]float64 = [5]float64{ 98, 93, 77, 82, 83 }

But I explained ":=" earlier so I can see how that would be confusing.

[zemo]

he means the type of the individual elements. Each element is of type float64, not int.

[nyan_sandwich]

vs Java-like

float64 myfloat64array[] = new(float64[5], ...)

[esschul]

It's nice, but I wish there was a summary page of the syntax. As an experienced coder, I don't really need to understand the concept of a map, only how it's done in go, and maybe restrictions.

[thomas11]

This book isn't for you, then. I understood it as an introduction to programming, using Go.

The official Go website http://golang.org has everything you need, including the spec [1] and the insightful Effective Go [2].

[1] http://golang.org/ref/spec

[2] http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html

[briandoll]

The website says that the book will be for sale on Amazon soon. Anyone know if it will be Kindle friendly? The text looks like it would convert easily from the web pages, if not.

[cdoxsey]

It's available now:

http://www.amazon.com/An-Introduction-Programming-Go-ebook/d...

[Kilimanjaro]

Can't help it, but it needs some more padding:

    #container { padding:60px }

Btw, great resource, the more the merrier.

[jamesbritt]

What's the best way to install Go on Linux (Ubuntu in particular)?

Build from source? Any caveats?

[jlgreco]

Building Go from source is trivial if you want to do that (two commands, one of which just grabs the Hg repo iirc. building only takes a few minutes on my underpowered eeepc.), but you may as well just use the binary distributions of it.

[cdoxsey]

http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Ubuntu

[alexk7]

I'm worried about Gordon the Gopher. He can't reach the pedals. :)

[lanna]

I would have named the book "Go Learn Yourself"

[lanna]

Or "Go Code Yourself"

[xtracto]

Any chance of providing an ePub version?

[taude]

Is there a web framework? Go on Rails?

[cdoxsey]

Go has a great built-in web server in net/http. Not as feature-rich as Rails, it's more akin to a micro framework like bottle.py. I ate my own dog food and the book's site is written in Go.

[taude]

I was half kidding, but found this: http://www.getwebgo.com/ and http://code.google.com/p/goweb/