Go in Action

by William Kennedy, Brian Ketelsen, Erik St. Martin

Go in Action introduces the Go language, guiding you from inquisitive developer to Go guru. The book begins by introducing the unique features and concepts of Go. Then, you'll get hands-on experience writing real-world applications including websites and network servers, as well as techniques to manipulate and convert data at speeds that will make your friends jealous.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Technical, Go, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Engineering

241 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Reviews

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Weird read. What's worse - a read I didn't enjoy ;/

Context:
My golang-fu is rather poor, but I know the language already. I've read this book just for fun, because I've already bought it plenty of time ago as a MEAP in Manning.

Briefly:
* very important introduction (quick-start) seems very chaotic & messy
* good (but not 100% up-to-date) chapter on packaging
* good chapter on concurrency
* VERY good chapter on concurrency patterns
* and plenty of other chapters that are barely worth mentioning ;/

To summarize:
Sorry, I can't recommend it. There are quite a few better books to learn Go.

[Josh Glover · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book claims to be aimed at people who know how to program but do not yet know Go. Despite this, it goes into a lot of detail on things that working programmers can understand at a glance.

Where the book really shone was when describing Go's concurrency model, which is what the language is known for. I wish more pages would have been devoted to concurrency and fewer to the more elementary parts of Go that are really just different syntax.

[Michael Koltsov · Rating 2 out of 5]

I always thought of myself as of a quick learner, therefore I prefer to practice and hone my skill rather than reading long and lenghty books. But this book is an exception. It’s not long, it’s not boring. But after reading it, I felt unsatisfied as the code examples were far from what’s needed in the real life, some parts of the language are shallowly described and the whole impression of the language it gives is that Go is very close to Javascript and you can easily learn it over the weekend. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with Go. I’ll give a try to “Go in Practice” from the same publisher in a hope that it will not leave me with lots of unanswered questions as this book did. My score is 2/5

[Minh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good for starters of golang language. Detail explaining about some concept like build-in type, channel, writer, reader, ...

[Ahmed Abdraboh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book to get your hands in Golang very quickly. I liked how it's approaching different concepts and the very simple explanation method.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird book. Not an in-depth reference nor a tutorial for beginners. In spite of its innocent name, "Chapter 2, Go quick-start" is far from a simple "Hello world" tutorial and can be daunting if you've never played with Go before. Beginners beware, the author assumes you already have a working knowledge of programming concepts such pointers and semaphores.

The 2 concurrency chapters are great, and the final chapter on testing, which includes mocking HTTP services, is a nice finishing touch. The chapter on Go's standards library was weaker than I expected and I found the lack of a chapter about the excellent net/http a glaring omission.

What I liked most about this book is that it describes some non-obvious quirks of Go, such as:

- Arrays arguments are passed by value, not by reference.
- Appending to a slice of a slice will modify modify the parent slice if the capacity of the child slice hasn't been reached.
- range makes a copy of the iterated value on each loop cycle.

Overall, 3.5/5 stars.

[Venkatesh-Prasad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great introduction to Go language. In 250 pages, it covers almost all of the features of Go language in sufficient detail to start programming in Go using almost all of its features. The book takes a no-nonsense approach that is grounded in examples (like most "in Action" books from Manning). Each concept is illustrated with simple examples that help clearly discern different possibilities. To get the most out of the book, the reader should have some programming experience; preferably, in languages that support pointers and classes.

I read this book right after reading "The Way to Go". So, this book was an easy and quick read. Since this book more recent, it covered more recent version (1.5) of Go and kinda cemented and clarified some of the contents covered in "Way to Go". However, "Way to Go" was much more thorough and a bit broader in terms of possibilities with Go (at 600 pages!!) I guess one can pick up "Way to Go" or "Go Programming Language" (I haven't read this yet) for more details about Go :)

[Redowan Delowar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a weird one for sure. Although the book's title has 'action' in the name, it still tries to cover the basics, only does a poor job at it. The second chapter feels hasty and it tries to explain different nuances of the language with a practical application but throws everything on your face right away. Who's the target audience here?

Where it shines is in explaining Go's exotic approach to concurrency. Most of the books only cover the basics like channels, goroutines, and a bunch of methods from the 'sync' package. However, the author did a fine job in explaining CSP basics and a few pragmatic patterns. The two sections regarding concurrency contain the best parts of the entire book. If you're somewhat well versed in Go, don't bother going through the earlier chapters.

[Oskar Díaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weno, como si no me lo hubiese leído, al final he acabado consultando todo por internet, como siempre. Comprarme el libro fue más una declaración de intenciones (¡aprendo go por mis huevos lerelos!!!), y me lo he leído, pero ba.

Pa hacerse una idea de como va Go, bien, pero un proyecto real usa mil movidas y se estructura de forma que aquí no ponen (ni hablan de dep o de protobuffer, por ejemplo).

En fin, delfín: no compréis libros de programar, amigos! programad con internet delante y fuera!

fmt.Println("Besis")

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you read one book on Go, this text is very comprehensive with regards to the choice of topics. But the pattern of code blocks and prose gets tiresome. Especially during the chapter on the standard library. At that point, reading the actual Go documentation is the same thing without block of prose.

[Lucas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was spoiled by the quality of Elixir in Action, and was expecting similar quality from other "In Action" series. Unfortunately the bar was set heigh and Go in Action couldn't reach it.

The book is very chaotic - almost all chapters look the same:

1. Describe the idea
2. Show complete program
3. Go line by line and describe what it does.

I don't recommend it to anyone.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 80 pages of the book so far are pretty good and a great start for upcoming Gophers. There is a bit of repetition and I rarely like it, when the content of the book is basically a copy of manpages or lists of methods and types, but I am looking forward to the next chapters.

Promising so far!

[Brian Wisti · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hoped for more of an introduction to using Go, but this turned out to be more of an introduction to the underlying mechanics of the language. Maybe it's good in that context. I don't know. Not a great book for somebody just getting started though.

[Gonzalo Fernández-Victorio · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a very good introduction to Go, the programming language. Probably the "Go Programming language" is better as a reference and to understand the nitty gritty. But this book gives context and a practical approach.

[Ahmad Tabbakha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book for people who are somewhat new to go but have had some programming experience. I think you can still learn as a complete beginner though. You will learn a lot of important basics from this book.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books to read to learn more than just the language spec of Go. Unfortunately all the top Go books could use a bit of updating, but this still is worth a read for sending someone in the right direction towards enjoying Go programming.

[Mathi Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource for experience programmers who want to get to know Go. It convinced me to build my next project using Go, with great examples, clear and complete explanations, short but still deep level.

[Edwin Dalorzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a good start to learning go. It covers the basics, the examples were helpful. There are small typos/errors in some of the examples and some of the examples hitting URL use Go's http API were outdated and produced errors. Other than that, it was a decent book.

[Vinicius · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing, despite short, book. Direct to the point and really useful, I LOVE to see code in action and, this series is made for me, I learn a lot more than the usual tutorial books, so it's perfect for my personal taste. Totally worth the read!

[Robisson Oliveira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book about the GO language, I'm reading it in 2024, even though it's from 2016, it's still one of the best books I've read about Golang. It covers the singularities of the language in a very broad way and how to get the best out of it.

[Yago Nobre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is a good introduction to go

[Xinhai · Rating 3 out of 5]

jump-start

[Kelvin Yan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introductory into GoLang for intermediate developers

[Shaon Shaonty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concurrency chapter is much helpful

[Hibiscus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of examples with detailed explanations that provide deep insight.
Liked virtually all the chapters.

Definitely recommend. Though perhaps it was too verbose )

[Jianping Zeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book for Go lang beginner

[Iva Miholic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good beginners book with type internals but could be much more detailed.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great intro to the language. Doesn't include any projects to build but that's not really the point of this book.

[Vijayekkumaran M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking for a book that can bootstrap experienced programmers into golang. Reviews pointed to this book and it was a right choice.

[Alexandre Manoel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a good basic knowledge about the language and how it works. But now I need to practice more to master the language.