Where to Find More Information

The best source for more information about Go is the official web site, https://golang.org, which provides access to the documentation, including the Go Programming Language Specification, standard packages, and the like. There are also tutorials on how to write Go and how to write it well, and a wide variety of online text and video resources that will be valuable complements to this book. The Go Blog at blog.golang.org publishes some of the best writing on Go, with articles on the state of the language, plans for the future, reports on conferences, and in-depth explanations of a wide variety of Go-related topics.

One of the most useful aspects of online access to Go (and a regrettable limitation of a paper book) is the ability to run Go programs from the web pages that describe them. This functionality is provided by the Go Playground at play.golang.org, and may be embedded within other pages, such as the home page at golang.org or the documentation pages served by the godoc tool.

The Playground makes it convenient to perform simple experiments to check one’s understanding of syntax, semantics, or library packages with short programs, and in many ways takes the place of a read-eval-print loop (REPL) in other languages. Its persistent URLs are great for sharing snippets of Go code with others, for reporting bugs or making suggestions.

Built atop the Playground, the Go Tour at tour.golang.org is a sequence of short interactive lessons on the basic ideas and constructions of Go, an orderly walk through the language.

The primary shortcoming of the Playground and the Tour is that they allow only standard libraries to be imported, and many library features—networking, for example—are restricted for practical or security reasons. They also require access to the Internet to compile and run each program. So for more elaborate experiments, you will have to run Go programs on your own computer. Fortunately the download process is straightforward, so it should not take more than a few minutes to fetch the Go distribution from golang.org and start writing and running Go programs of your own.

Since Go is an open-source project, you can read the code for any type or function in the standard library online at https://golang.org/pkg; the same code is part of the downloaded distribution. Use this to figure out how something works, or to answer questions about details, or merely to see how experts write really good Go.