Author: Wei-Meng Lee
Publisher: For Dummies
Date: April 2021
Pages: 336
ISBN: 978-1119786191
Print: 1119786193
Kindle: B0921HHN48
Audience: People wanting to learn Go
Rating: 4
Reviewer: Mike James
Can a dummy master Go?

I don't mind Dummies books, but I think the branding is a big mistake. So you want to learn Go - start out by admitting you are a dummy and advertise it to all and sundry. Human psychology is strange. More to the point the dummy who buys this book has to be a reasonable programmer in some other language and not a complete beginner - and by my definition that means no dummy.

Moving off from my rant on the inappropriate and insulting title we need to return to the content of the book, after all you could just read it on a Kindle or in a brown paper cover. Part 1 is about getting started, what else could it be. It recommends using VS Code as an IDE, something I agree with not because VS Code is good for Go, but because it is the best of a bad bunch and a lot of people use it. The rest of the section is on the usual stuff - loops, conditionals data types and functions. This you should already know and if you do you hardly need the help converting to Go offered by this section.

The good news is that the book quickly moves on from the simple and starts to look at how to do things. Part 2 is about data - Arrays and Slices, Structs, Maps and using JSON. Part 3 is about multitasking which is what Go is supposed to be good at, although not everyone agrees. Its two chapters deal with threading and the use of channels. Part 4 is  on creating packages and modules and is the last part of the book on "pure" Go.

From this point on, the book is about using Go. Part 5 is called Seeing Go in Action and is a collection of applications in three chapters - Web APIs, REST,  and Database, mostly MySQL. The final part has two chapters that provide ten things each. First comes ten useful Go packages. Finally there are ten useful Go resources. 

Verdict: This is a fairly reasonable book on Go. It isn't for Dummies and it is well-written and to the point. It is a fairly standard account of a language to anyone who can already program, but it isn't as consice as you might wish for in the early chapters.  It doesn't do a good job selling Go's advantages as a language  and it doesn't deal wtih Go as a system programming language. You might want a copy if some of the practical examples correspond to things you want to do.  

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