Preface
My first choice for a book title was Boring Go because, properly written, Go is boring.
It might seem a bit weird to write a book on a boring topic, so I should explain. Go has a small feature set that is out of step with most other modern programming languages. Well-written Go programs tend to be straightforward and sometimes a bit repetitive. There’s no inheritance, no generics, no aspect-oriented programming, no function overloading, and certainly no operator overloading. There’s no pattern matching, no named parameters, no exceptions. To the horror of many, there are pointers. Go’s concurrency model is unlike other languages, but it’s based on ideas from the 1970’s, as is the algorithm used for its garbage collector. In short, Go feels like a throwback. And that’s the point.
Boring does not mean trivial. Using Go correctly requires an understanding of how its features are intended to fit together. While you can write Go code that looks like Java or Python, you’re going to be unhappy with the result and wonder what all the fuss is about. That’s where this book comes in. It walks through the features of Go, explaining how to best use them to write idiomatic code that can grow.
When it comes to building things that last, being boring is great. No one wants to be the first person to drive their car over a bridge built with untested techniques that the engineer thought were cool. The modern world depends on software as much as it depends on bridges, perhaps more so. Yet many programming languages add features without thinking about their impact on the maintainability of the codebase. Go is intended for building programs that last, ones that are modified by dozens of developers over dozens of years.
Go is boring and that’s fantastic. I hope this book teaches you how to build exciting projects with boring code.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is targeted at developers who are interested in learning more about Go as a second (or fifth) language. It assumes they have already worked through a Go tutorial, maybe even written some Go code already. You should be familiar with version control (preferably git) and IDEs, and basic computer science concepts like concurrency and abstraction. The focus for the book isn’t how to write programs in Go, it’s how to write Go idiomatically. While most of Go’s features are found in other languages, Go makes different tradeoffs, so programs written in it have a different structure.
If you are an experienced programmer who has never written Go before, start with Introducing Go: Build Reliable, Scalable Programs by Caleb Doxsey and then come back to Idiomatic Go for more in-depth information on the language and how to best put all of the parts together.
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