The Best Ways To Get Started Learning The Go Programming Language

After spending several years coding in JavaScript, I was ready to try something new. Since I'm a web developer, I wanted to learn a new language that's general purpose but primarily used for web development, simple to learn but also in its design, fast, and has a good standard library. I chose Go.

When I first got interested in learning Go, I had a hard time figuring out where to start.

So, if you are trying to learn Go, here's the best way to get started:

• Read These Books: Let's Go by Alex Edwards is a great way to learn the fundamentals of Go by building a small application. The author introduces new concepts by adding new features so you're learning things by doing. There's also a sequel to this book called Let's Go Further, which follows the same teaching style and dives deep into advanced Go concepts.
• Listen To The Go Time Podcast: While the Go Time podcast is no longer running, there are some great episodes in their archive. Some of the hosts have started a new podcast called Fallthrough (great name) and it's worth listening to it as well.
• Use Perplexity Labs to create personalised lessons: In the system prompt I instruct the LLM to explain Go concepts based on the experience level I mention. More importantly, in the prompt I ask it to generate up to 5 practical exercises with increasing difficulty and then include solutions at the end of the lesson. I then ask Perplexity in Labs mode to generate a lesson on goroutines for beginners, for example. I then read through the lesson, do the exercises, and check my work against the solution. I also sometimes ask for idiomatic Go solutions after I've learned as a follow up question. Here's the prompt: https://gist.github.com/0xi4o/521bdfab24334e64ffa62b7cf0eb6948

These 3 resources will exponentially accelerate your learning process.