The essential issue is that there are a number of resources for people "with prior programming experience" and literally none for people learning Go as a first language. I find this to be very unfortunate because so much of Go promotes solid programming practices that could significantly impact beginners for the rest of their coding lives (goroutines instead of promises, for example). Instead, the community seems content with simply suggesting beginners "learn another language first" and I've accepted that. I just find it a real loss of an excellent opportunity.
The rest of this is just me blabbing on about helping beginners. 😀 And I'm sorry, that book is anything but clear. In my experience, the people who say such things also say that K&R C is "clear." It's a matter of opinion and audience, and if you are a Ph.D in computer science with C coding under your belt, hell yeah, it's *very* clear. I just work with beginners with no CS experience a lot and they balk at the irrelevant examples, unnecessary bombastic voice, and excessive assumptions. I'm sincerely glad some do find it valuable. By the way, why doesn't our community promote more top-of-the-line, free resources over paid books that become immediately out of date? With all the money being dumped into "universities" and "free training" of late from different corporations facing the doubt of good IT talent I want to believe a dedicated team focused specifically on helping beginners adopt Go is a possibility --- especially given the critical dependency on Go in all of cloud native computing. Being able to read Go source (minimally) should be mandatory learning for any infrastructure engineer these days. I've solved so many problems simply from reading the K8S or Helm source rather than the docs. I get the impression so many are so busy doing amazing things *with* Go that there is very little energy left to do things to help others start, and by others I don't mean those paying for corporate training. I mean those capable of learning but with limited means; I mean the AP CS programs that are still mandating mastering of single OOP inheritance that completely neglect concurrent programming practices; I mean self-taught upskillers learning to write their own Kubernetes operators. Go could easily displace Java as the best AP CS language if more attention were given to these considerations. The Tour of Go is only about 60% finished according to the project milestones in the source of the project. And who thought throwing bitwise operators in the first chapter (or so) was a good idea? It just seems like people are content letting beginners fend for themselves, which is fine for most, but not for the vast majority of people for whom Go is supposedly created. This is the reason I regularly receive feedback about Go from the many I've helped who say, "Go just isn't beginner friendly" and I'm tired of them saying that "Rust is more welcoming" (which is just so untrue). I know I'm droning on, but someone has to bring this up. Go *is* for beginners. We just need help convince people, and frankly that starts with being able to make a simple, solid book/resource recommendation for beginners. There's just nothing out there. I've read 'em all. There are literally no books that cover even 1.17 for beginners. (Modules were one of the worst things to happen to beginners and we are finally getting on with a simpler future.) With Go 1.18 we have a real opportunity to correct this. For the record, I'm slowly putting together enough material to crowd-source a beginner Go 1.18 book and have probably a few dozen people interested in helping, but like so many others, I have other stuff I'm first required to focus on. Look forward to anything I can do to help. Thank you. --- Rob Muhlestein r...@rwx.gg https://twitch.tv/rwxrob ------- Original Message ------- On Monday, March 14th, 2022 at 1:06 PM, Steve Mynott <steve.myn...@gmail.com> wrote: > My experience with this book has been different. I thought it was > > superb -- a masterpiece of clarity. > > I don't think it's intended for absolute beginners to programming but > > it's great for people with prior programming experience. > > It seems to me unlikely there isn't a suitable absolute beginners book > > available from publishers such as Manning, O'Reilly and No Starch > > Press. > > S > > On Mon, 14 Mar 2022 at 16:09, Rob Muhlestein r...@rwx.gg wrote: > > > As an educator and mentor I've had very negative feedback about that book > > from dozens, from 12 to 50 years old. I preordered 25 when it came out and > > regret ever having anyone start Go with it. One brilliant kid (who went on > > to teach himself Assembly and C) nearly threw it at me. To date, I have > > been unable to solidly recommend any book for beginners. This lack of good > > beginner instruction remains one of the great flaws of Go in general. I'm > > asked daily what to buy and have nothing to tell them. I bought "Mastering > > Go" recently and it contains "generics" as proposed from 2019 (I should > > have known since Packt published it). I know the authors are capable, good > > people, but these books just do not hit the mark. It is one of the only > > areas where I can confidently say Rust does a better job. Their > > documentation team is amazing. > > > > On Sunday, February 13, 2022 at 6:22:47 AM UTC-5 christoph...@gmail.com > > wrote: > > > > > Hello Go friends, > > > > > > is there a new edition of the "Go Programming Language" book to be > > > published soon ? > > > > > > It is quite old now and there have been a few changes to Go since then. > > > Go.mod and generics. I was considering buying it, but if a new edition > > > comes out in a few months, it would be wasted money. > > > > -- > > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "golang-nuts" group. > > > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > > email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > > > To view this discussion on the web visit > > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/35da213c-0ff6-4677-b800-f4aa79ea0130n%40googlegroups.com. > > -- > > Steve Mynott steve.myn...@gmail.com > > rsa3072/629FBB91565E591955B5876A79CEFAA4450EBD50 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/p1u4j9_xp1GL58dJtM1-kt1TlJ-WWBk5sEd5pqMII1manrfCznDNkN9JosTXBX-bCB9TJk6B8VH6f1dioXca7XjOywfHZHyfF0kF-wfshSM%3D%40rwx.gg.
