Learn Go Fast - Top Courses and Resources
Last published November 2, 2020
Want to learn Go fast? The good news is that Go is one of the simplest programming languages out there. It was designed to have a compact feature set, which means you can learn it much faster than most other languages.
What is Golang?
The Go programming language, or Golang for short, is an open-source programming language that helps developers create simple, reliable and efficient software. Go was developed at Google in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It was designed to be fast, easy and safe to use. Go is quickly becoming one of the most popular programming languages and is one of the best-paid languages for developers.
Best Courses
1. Learn Go - Boot.dev
We obviously have to give ourselves credit! We have recently released our new Learn Go course. This course can be taken entirely in the browser and covers all the basic syntax and concepts of Go. If you have some development experience and want to start your Go career, this is the course for you.
2. Go By Example
Similar to Learn Go, this course is a great way to learn the basics in the browser. This course has been around for a while and has a lot of support from the community. You won’t get automated feedback for correct answers, but it’s still a fantastic resource.
3. A Tour of Go
The tour of go is supported officially by the Go language, and as such has some great high-quality information. Similar to “Go By Example”, the Tour of Go isn’t a course with a certificate or quizzes but is more like beginner-friendly documentation and tutorials.
The tour uses the Go Playground for its computation backend (as mentioned below). The tour is great if you are unsure of whether or not you want to commit to a full course and just want to play around with the language.
4. Golang University 101
Here John Arundel provides a pick of Go tutorials, conference talks, and other videos that will help you learn the basics of the Go programming language.
Best Communities
1. The Go Forum
The Go forum is a fairly tight-knit online community with a very go-centric community. It’s a great place to start and interact with other “Gophers”. I would highly recommend joining this forum as well as the other communities listed below.
2. Reddit - /r/golang
If you know what Reddit is, this is the place for all Go discussion. If you don’t know what Reddit is, I’m sorry.
3. Gophers Slack
If you are into real-time discussion then the Gophers slack channel is the place to be. There are plenty of awesome channels for all kinds of Go devs. Some of my favorites include:
- #newbies
- #jobs
- #showandtell
- #performance
4. #golang on Twitter
5. Good Gophers list on Twitter
Best Blogs
1. Boot.dev Go Category
We regularly publish Go-related content and you can follow it by sorting for “golang” on boot.dev. you can also grab the RSS feed here.
2. The Go Blog
This is the official Golang blog maintained by Go team. Can’t recommend it enough.
3. Dave Cheney’s Blog
Dave Cheney is a personal favorite of mine. He was one of the first Gophers and has been a prolific writer and fantastic community member.
4. Thoughts and links about programming, by Russ Cox
Best Editors and IDEs
My favorite is VS Code because I use it for everything. That said, here is my full list:
Best Documentation and Tutorials
Related Articles
The Nuances of Constants in Go; Go Isn't JavaScript
Oct 22, 2020 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Constants can be confusing and easy to misuse in Go if you are coming from an untyped language. Let’s take a look at some of the nuanced details of how they work in Go. It’s probably unsurprising, but Go’s constants are almost nothing like JavaScript’s bastardized version of the concept.
How to Structure a Golang Project
Oct 01, 2020 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
I lead a team that’s responsible for anywhere from 15-25 Go microservices at any given time. We’re constantly creating new services and libraries, so it’s become important to streamline the project creation process. I’m mostly writing this article for myself as a kind of self-documentation, but hopefully, you’ll find it useful as you create new Go projects for yourself.
Running Go in the Browser with WASM and Web Workers
Sep 23, 2020 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
We’ve recently made big changes to how we execute Go in the browser on boot.dev and want to explain the enhancements. Web Workers are the reason we’ve been able to solve some of the serious browser-related coding problems that were holding us back. Consider this article a sequel to Running Go in the Browser with Web Assembly.
How to Make Pure Functions in Golang
Sep 07, 2020 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Pure functions are often hyped up in the JavaScript world, probably because of the abundance of stateful front end applications. While pure functions have their downsides (i.e. inconvenience, potentially large argument lists), they should be used as much as reasonably possible.