First chapter of Kernighan and Donovan's new Go book [pdf]

From the book:<p>&quot;But it has comparatively few features and is unlikely to add more. For instance, it has no implicit numeric conversions, no constructors or destructors, no operator overloading, no default parameter values, no inheritance, no generics, no exceptions, no macros, no function annotations, and no thread-local storage.&quot;

To those in the Go community:<p>- What is Go well suited for other than network programming? - Why might one decide to write the backend API of their web app in Go, compared to say Grails, Python etc.

&quot;Typeset by the authors in Minion Pro, Lato, and Consolas, using Go, groff, ghostscript, and a host of other open-source Unix tools. Figures were created in Google Drawings.&quot;<p>groff still going strong... although it seems like Kernighan got tired of drawing using the &#x27;pic&#x27; language...

Interesting to see that the direct lineage from Pike&#x27;s prior languages and CSP experiments is reaffirmed. I wrote about this here earlier, with some notable disagreements in response: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9711639" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9711639</a>

Question for the Go experts out there: does it make sense to buy this book to learn Go or are there better tutorials&#x2F;books?

This is much better than the previous Go documentation, particularly in the concurrency area. The previous Go documentation introduced goroutines and channels, stated the mantra &quot;share by communicating, not by sharing&quot;, and then gave examples with variables shared between goroutines.<p>It now seems to be recognized that, in Go, if you want to lock shared data, use the lock primitives. Don&#x27;t try to construct locking primitives from channels; that&#x27;s error-prone and hard to read. This new manual seems to recognize this. When they want a shared counter, they use a shared counter with traditional locks.

This is a good place to ask this (because Go posts attract a lot of commenters, even those who dislike Go and like some other language):<p>Which language&#x2F;framework would you choose today for writing WebServices? Preferably with the following characteristics: static type (or at least static analysis), easy deployment (ex, generates a single binary like in Go), supports concurrency very well, is small&#x2F;simple, has good tooling and debug support, and is fun to write. Go (except for good debug support)? Elixir (dunno how good it is with deployment and debugging)?

Link is to Chapter 1 with no context about whole book&#x2F;availaibility.<p>Book homepage is here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gopl.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gopl.io&#x2F;</a><p>mods, please fix<p>Several free full Go eBooks listed at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackershelf.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;golang&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackershelf.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;golang&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m currently reading it as I started to program in Golang only one month ago and I&#x27;d never heard of goimports, this is a nice tool! Mixing it with GoSublime and it does a really good job <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelwhatcott.com&#x2F;gosublime-goimports&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michaelwhatcott.com&#x2F;gosublime-goimports&#x2F;</a><p>The book is well written and it looks like it covers a lot of common topics, I think I&#x27;m gonna buy it.

Just as K&amp;R introduced us to &quot;Hello, World,&quot; I&#x27;m amused they adapted their first program to an Unicode world: &quot;Hello, 世界.&quot; Seems like a great first chapter, covering computer graphics and web server&#x2F;byte fetching to boot.

K&amp;R is a great book. Even though I have no interest in Go, I&#x27;ll read this, just to see if it&#x27;s as good.

I noticed that the lissajous program in 1.4, as included, generates non-random lissajous figures since the random number generator is not seeded. I couldn&#x27;t find any reference to this in the text and this could be confusing to beginning readers. Is there a recommended way to submit errata?

Would Go provide a viable alternative to C++ for numeric and computer graphics &#x27;kind of stuff&#x27;? I have no problem with C++ but the better-than-python proclamations got me intrigued.

This is going to be the standard text for the language. The quality of writing is exceptionally good. It&#x27;s high time the AW professional computing series had another hit.

The K&amp;R for Go, sounds great!

I just pre-ordered this book. I already have a feeling it will make into my favorite book series [1].<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catonmat.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;top-100-books-part-one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catonmat.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;top-100-books-part-one&#x2F;</a>

One of my co-workers preordered this, I hope to skim through it if he brings it into the office.

Can people post their opinions on static linking of go binaries? Doesn&#x27;t it result in increased size of runtime binaries when compared to those generated by C&#x2F;C++?

&gt; ...its approach to data abstraction and object-oriented programming is unusually flexible.<p>I&#x27;m not sure I can get behind that without generics.

Hope this book is going to be another Epic and Great reference like this gem[1]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;t3.gstatic.com&#x2F;images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTK3WbaQiO5mCmvRGtvcokJUyrd2wcpOj3WcgO8TQyecr3_TrmU" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;t3.gstatic.com&#x2F;images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTK3WbaQiO5mCmvRGtvc...</a>

They&#x27;ve proven that they can make a PDF. Will they sell me one?

I still prefer forced data abstraction, i.e. classes as a core construct. GO does not force that. Data abstraction, when properly done maps the code more closely into the problem domain to be solved. In the long run that makes the code more maintainable and extensible.

er, they left a couple things out of the family tree (page xii). Like C++, Java, C#, ...

I have no idea what they will specifically say regarding calling C from Go, but the table of contents says that part is only going to be about five pages.<p>I really wish they would beef up this portion of the book.