The hard way, of course.
🤬 You do not need to spent any money whatsoever to learn Go programming. There’s nothing magical about paying that is going to remove you from the responsibility to learn it just like anyone would without paying. If you have cash to burn, great, support an author or content creator. If not, don’t panic.
I learned Go after having learned several other languages already. So when I did the Tour of Go it was annoying, but I got it. Eventually, I gave up on it as a waste of time and just jumped in to create a project.
My first Go project was a password management utility for SKILSTAK to help me help young community members remember their passwords. When I needed something, I searched it and added it.
💬 When I discovered PGP/GPG was in the standard library I immediately fell in love. Only people in the security space will understand why that is such a big deal.
Your learning path will probably be very different than mine or others. Choose your own path. Here’s what I recommend having helped 100s at this point to learn it (and get jobs coding it).
⚠️ Make sure to read the actual documentation before anything else on the Internetz.
First learn the Linux command line and bash. This is a very
unpopular recommendation, but Imma make it anyway. There are many
people who do not use Linux to code Go (which is part of its appeal),
but those who do will always have several advantages over them. Take
the time to learn Linux, containers, vim, tmux, and lynx or
w3m and how to script in bash (at least) before jumping into Go.
Besides, you’ll be that much closer to learning C, which I could
argue requires the command line for development. You might even
learn C before learning Go. C is certainly not more difficult than
Go, it just misses many things Go provides (and is the reason Go was
created at Google in the first place).
Learn any other language first. As easy as Go is to learn, Go is
not for people who have never coded anything. Your first language
really doesn’t matter. I recommend something simple and imperative
(like bash with shellcheck). The creators of Go would definitely
recommend learning C as a first language (since they helped create
it). In fact, the official tag-line for Go is “a simpler C.”
Get familiar with Go basics. This is probably the hardest part
because Go is undergoing changes that affect beginners, mostly
modules and things like ioutil deprecation. All the
‘beginner’ existing contend is very out of date. The best I can
recommend (until and if I complete my own beginner content) is Tour
of Go, which assumes you have some programming experience. While
I really like the Head First series of books from O’Reilly,
I cannot recommend Head First Go at the moment. Jay is a great
author, but the content is very out of date. Perhaps you can find
something useful on https://golangresources.com but probably not,
almost all of it is out of date or just stupid.
Read ‘How to Write Go Code’. This is a critical read because it covers the idiomatic things that aren’t strictly required but preferred in almost all Go code. This has many examples of Go that will help make it seem familiar — especially if you aren’t used to the reverse notation of type specification and such.
Read ‘Effective Go’. Even though this was written a long time ago it is really a must read still even today.
Read the Go language specification. If reading the language specification doesn’t appeal to you, then you might not actually be that interesting in coding in general. In my experience, the best developers are attracted to specifications naturally. Understanding the specification will mean learning EBNF (learn ABNF and BNF while you are at it). Specifications are written in these meta languages. (You could learn PEGN.dev as well.)
Read and write Go code. Get a GitHub account and identify some
solid, simple, Go code bases and read them. Search the Internetz for
golang (the official search term for Go). You might start with Go
itself. The standard library is very well written. Some others that
seem good are the gh GitHub tool, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm. I have
some Go code you can look at as well.
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