🎉 Just learning Go? Welcome to the party! Here’s what I recommend most people do to learn it well. Note that most of these resources assume you already know how to program, that you know what a “loop” is, for example.
💥 It is really important you get coding something you want to make, a project, as soon as possible. That will keep you motivated to learn. Obviously, you’ll be writing a lot of your own code between reading books. But, by the time you read all of that, while coding at the same time, you’ll be on your way to becoming a Go master for sure.
I’m not a fan of most “awesome” lists. Most of them are full of stuff that, um, really isn’t awesome at all. A lot are there to promote stuff. My list has three purposes:
Disclosure: I actually sponsor some of these with my own cash. They are really that good.
Everything here is either Apache, BSD, or MIT licensed. I don’t do GPLv3.
🌳 Go Bonzai™ CLI framework and library
https://github.com/rwxrob/bonzai
A truly unique CLI framework with recursive tab completion; no exported shell code required for completion; command aliases; multicall or monolith binaries; rich embedded command documentation with markdown and templating; library of completers (files, dates, calculator); persisted variables to user local cache; library of “batteries included” commonly needed functions and data structures suitable for learning and porting your shell scripts to a Bonzai home kit monolith instead; hackers love it for rootkits
GitHub command line tool helper library
https://github.com/cli/go-gh
Tcell, Go TUI library
https://github.com/gdamore/tcell
Pure-Go terminal “cell” (curses) library for text terminals; best in class at the moment
Tview, Go TUI library
https://github.com/rivo/tview
https://code.rocketnine.space/tslocum/cview
It’s like having CSS in your terminal (but not); makes short work of
terminal applications that need regularly used widgets, used by K9S
and others; cview, a forked version, is also good
Bubbletea, another great TUI library
https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
Glamour, themed Markdown rendering for terminal
https://github.com/charmbracelet/glamour
This is the same used for gh. A little buggy, but good.
Grab, Highly Concurrent Downloads with Status
https://github.com/cavaliercoder/grab
When you need really good download ability
Only safe way to write to a file in any language
https://github.com/rogpeppe/go-internal
The internal libraries used by the go binary itself; home of
lockedfile (proposed standard addition); truly safe writes to a
file on all operating systems; (You’re probably doing it wrong.
Creating a “lock” file is never enough.)
Protobuf performant serialization
https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf
Best of breed way to turn a struct into a data stream or file and parse it (unmarshal) it back into a struct later; basis of gRPC and most Kubernetes communication; replaces JSON APIs for most things
modernc.org/sqlite
https://gitlab.com/cznic/sqlite
Package sqlite is a cgo-free port of SQLite. The 20% loss of performance is worth it for most people to have cross-compilation compatibility.
SQLX, the missing SQL package
https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx
Without this database/sql is remarkably painful to use.
There are a lot of bad Go learning resources out there. Most of them are woefully out of date. Just be really careful. Nothing goes on this this that isn’t 100% relevant to modern Go 1.18+ and available for free (although I encourage you to support them the best you can).
RWXROB community
https://linktr.ee/rwxrob
Go-Nuts USENET Newsgroup.
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts
This is where the creators and Go project leaders are regularly answering questions and discussing the direction of the language. This resource is far better than Reddit and even the official Go Discord channel (which you can find from https://go.dev). Keep in mind that anything ever written here is permanently saved, forever. I prefer this because all submissions are moderated and people actually take a moment to consider what they write before posting toxic crap (unlike Reddit and Discord, etc.)
Beej’s Guide to Network Programming
https://beej.us/guide/bgnet
The book is in C, but so much of Go programming overlaps with that domain — especially with microservices — that reading this book should be mandatory for Go developers (or any developer). It covers things like proper UNIX file system semaphores and other architectural design concerns that most people coming to coding from academia or otherwise just won’t think about intuitively.
Why Go and Not Rust
https://kristoff.it/blog/why-go-and-not-rust>
This is a very stoic and objective look (not my personal writing style) at why Go is the language of enterprise and cloud-native computing and why it will never lose that position to anything else — especially Rust. I’ll confess to a, “well duh” thought a time or two while reading it, but a lot of beginners and veterans alike might need to read the very practical reason why Go is the best tool for most things and Rust is perhaps the best tool for a few isolated things, which is why the most significant software applications of the cloud and container era were all written in Go, not Rust and, by extension, why there are tons of jobs for Go and almost zero for Rust developers.
Protocol Buffers
https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers
Protobuf format is mandatory learning for any serious Go developer wanting to get into microservices or anything that communicates or caches with performance requirements.