📚 How I am Learning Go

Luis Gamarra Jimenez — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 23:54:08 +0000

fmt.Println("Hello, Go!")

One of my favorite things to do my senior year in college was to attend hackathons. In one of those hackathons, I needed to build a web service that can handle HTTP requests. At the end of that weekend, I learned how to use AWS Lambda.

Random thought 💭: Man, I miss those free AWS credits from MLH!

Fast forwarding almost two years, I have gotten to work with many AWS services. Through that process I have developed a passion for building tools and infrastructure. While learning about DevOps, I came cross Go and I was quickly intrigued. That now leads to this post.

After many weeks of putting it off, this week I decided to start learning Go. First, I started reading the book The Go Programming Language by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan. The first couple of chapters gave me a great introduction to the language but mid-way through chapter 3, I realized that this is not a book to get me started quickly. So instead, I turned to Go in Action by William Kennedy, Brian Ketelsen, and Erik St. Martin. This book has been a quick read and has given me a high level introduction to Go (currently reading chapter 6 on concurrency). I have enjoyed it very much!

To put into practice what I have learned so far, I am solving problems on Leetcode. I have found this approach has helped me get familiar with built-in types and packages. Through this, I realized that I needed to understand pointers better (a post on that coming soon). So far this have been a fun and challenging approach.

My direction going forward is to finish reading the "Go in Action" book and start working on projects, which I am noting down as random ideas come up.

Feel free to comment on ways that you have approached learning Go or any other programming language and project ideas you recommend!

Cover image by Maria Letta from https://github.com/MariaLetta/free-gophers-pack

DEV Community: Luis Gamarra Jimenez

📚 How I am Learning Go