from Hacker News

With book on Go, Kernighan guides students at Princeton and beyond

by baijum on 3/12/16, 1:15 PM with 64 comments

• by alblue on 3/12/16, 2:08 PM

  I wrote a review of this book at InfoQ earlier this year:

  http://www.infoq.com/articles/the-go-programming-language-bo...

  There's a free chapter available from the book's website http://gopl.io which should give you an idea of what the rest of the book is like. The intro goes into a little bit too much detail but if you gloss over that the remaining chapters are pretty else detailed. There are some nuggets distributed through the book but you could easily gloss over them if you were skim reading it, such as learning that exported identifiers begin with an upper case letter and those that are private are lower case.

• by rottencupcakes on 3/12/16, 3:05 PM

  I should have figured out context based on the name Kernighan, but the word Go (especially as it relates to google) is awfully overloaded for the time being.

• by clishem on 3/12/16, 1:56 PM

  I have read the book this article is referring to. Contrary to the raving reviews on Amazon, I wasn't that impressed by it. I imagine that it is a great book for those coming from dynamically typed languages, but if you already know C, for example, the book is probably way too verbose for you.

• by bitteralmond on 3/12/16, 6:33 PM

  The magic of Kernighan:

  "When we were choosing among typesetting systems, Brian never let on that he was one of the original authors of Troff, the system we ultimately went with," Donovan said. "I realized this only after researching many early papers on digital typesetting; Brian co-wrote all of them."

• by DocSavage on 3/12/16, 2:58 PM

  Brett Slatkin wrote a positive review from the perspective of an experienced Go programmer: http://www.onebigfluke.com/2016/03/book-review-go-programmin...

• by kozukumi on 3/12/16, 6:27 PM

  golang is a nice language but I just can't find a reason to use it over other languages for anything other than networking/server projects.

  How many HN readers are using golang for things you would normally use Java or C++ or Python or ... for? What is it you are working on? And how have you found using golang?

• by muyfine on 3/23/16, 2:47 AM

  On the positive side, taking COS 333 with Kernighan could not possibly be worse than taking it with Koenig!

• by frik on 3/12/16, 1:58 PM

  Direct link to the books website: http://www.gopl.io/

• by dominotw on 3/12/16, 4:11 PM

  does gooracle work with 1.6 vendoring ? I can't seem to find an issue tracker for the project.

• by gravypod on 3/12/16, 6:35 PM

  I don't understand why we "need" textbooks, specifically in the world of Computer Science. Most of the amazing work done to make computers are what they are today is available online.

• by plg on 3/12/16, 2:31 PM

  Page margins are so small!

• by dbpokorny on 3/12/16, 6:53 PM

  What problems would you rather attack with C + Go vs. a somewhat more mature C + Python?