With assistance from Google, Codecademy has added a course on Go, the language developed by Google. Designed to be beginner-friendly it first four modules are now live.

As the Learn Go course overview explains:

Go (or Golang) is an open source programming language designed to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale.

Google uses Go specifically for its large networks of servers, and Go also powers much of Google’s own cloud platform. Developers use Go in application development, web development, in operations and infrastructure teams, and much more. It is the language of Cloud Native infrastructure and software development.

Four lessons, with a total 9 hours worth of content are currently available:

1. Introduction - a very brief background, followed by the basics of how to read and run a Go program and work with packages
2. Variables - covering data types and variables
3. Conditionals - covering the if, else, else if and switch statements; comparison and logical operators, randomizing and seeding random numbers.
4. Functions - covering scope, returning values, parameters followed by a second lesson on Addresses and Pointers.

The lessons are broken down into small steps and you complete each one before you are allowed to move on:

Each lesson is reinforced with quizzes that ensure that you have understood and not simply followed instructions and used the hint facility to get a solution.

Each lesson also has a project to build:

1. Gopher It: Print out ASCII art using Go.
2. Comic Mischief: Use variables to store data about a comic shop.
3. Bank Heist: Simulate a bank heist using conditionals.
4. Interstellar Travel: Call the functions of a space-traveling agency.

While these lessons are free, users are encouraged to start a Free Trial to  Codecademy Pro which, for a monthly or annual subscription gives access to the the platform's entire catalog of free and paid courses with additional content, including quizzes, portfolio-building projects, and learning paths customized to users' goals.

Although this course is aimed at beginners, Go itself isn't really a language for first time programmers and its better to think of it as being for those completely new to Go but with some familiarity with JavaScript or some other language. Also if you are new to Codecademy then it is worth working through its 7-step lesson Welcome to Codecademy, which explains how the platform is All about "learning by doing" and gives you familiarity with the three pane screen in which you read the text in the top of the left-hand panel and then follow the instructions that are given lower down. The center panel contains the code you are working on and it runs in the browser panel on the right. 

More Information

Learn Go (Codecademy)

Related Articles

Codecademy Introduces More Paid Options

Codecademy Adds Java For Beginners

Go At Eight

Go Survey Shows Show Continuing Preference For Go

Go Survey Revelations

Go Developer Network Launched

Go 1.13 Modernizes Number Literals

Go Rejects The Syntactic Sugar Of Try

Help Go DevelopGo 2 Details Revealed

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info