Coursera has added the Go Programming language to its portfolio of computer language courses. It is designed for those who have had some experience programming in another language but now wish to learn about the features and capabilities of Go.

Until now if you wanted to learn about Go you could read a book, or the series of articles A Programmer's Guide To Go on this site. A MOOC on the topic is therefore to be welcomed.

The Programming With Google Go is at intermediate-level, so you are expected to be familiar with programming concepts. It comprises three courses, each four weeks in length, with video lectures by Professor Ian Harris from the University of California, Irvine which are accompanied by automatically graded multiple-choice quizzes and peer-reviewed programming assignments.

Each of the courses comprising the  can be taken on its own and, as standalone courses, can be audited - which means access to the video lectures but not to the peer graded assignments or the quizzes. If you want to earn certificates for each course, and a certificated for completing the specialization the cost if $49 dollars per month and a 7-day Free Trial period. All the courses start again on November 5.

Go is an open source programming language originally developed by a team at Google. According to Ian Harris:

Go on the whole is a sort of sweet spot where it's efficient, close to C, but it's also easy to use like Python or Java

The first course, Getting Started with Go, introduces the basic elements of the language including unique features such as slices that are not available in other programming environments. After some overview lectures there's a video explaining how to install the Go programming environment and after that the first module ends in a peer assessed activity to write a Hello World. Subsequent weeks cover basic and composite data types and protocols and formats.

The second course, Functions, Methods, and Interfaces in Go, expands your knowledge of Go with a focus on object-oriented features such as classes and encapsulation, and allows you to practice writing code to solve practical problems. The third and final course, Concurrency in Go, shows you how to write Go code that executes more rapidly through parallel execution in multi-processor environments.

Although it is still very new there are already some reviews of the courses. The first one achieves a rating of 4.6 (our of 5), being marked down for only having minimal examples. The second was rated 4.7 and the third 4.8 with one of the 5-star comments from someone who had completed the specialization being:

The course did what was intended: Teaching the things that makes Go programming special. I mean, simple but powerful language constructs and Concurrency.

If you want to know more about Go these courses are an attractive way to find out about it and if you have a professional interest this specialization seems worthwhile.

More Information

Programming With Google Go

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