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Learn Go Fast - Top Courses and Resources

By Lane Wagner on Nov 2, 2020

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Want to learn Go fast? The good news is that Go is one of the simplest programming languages out there. It was designed to have a compact feature set, which means you can learn it much faster than most other languages.

๐Ÿ”— What is Golang?

The Go programming language, or Golang for short, is an open-source programming language that helps developers create simple, reliable and efficient software. Go was developed at Google in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It was designed to be fast, easy and safe to use. Go is quickly becoming one of the most popular programming languages and is one of the best-paid languages for developers.

๐Ÿ”— Best Courses

๐Ÿ”— 1. Learn Go - Boot.dev

We obviously have to give ourselves credit! We have recently released our new Learn Go course. This course can be taken entirely in the browser and covers all the basic syntax and concepts of Go. If you have some development experience and want to start your Go career, this is the course for you.

๐Ÿ”— 2. Go By Example

Similar to Learn Go, this course is a great way to learn the basics in the browser. This course has been around for a while and has a lot of support from the community. You won’t get automated feedback for correct answers, but it’s still a fantastic resource.

๐Ÿ”— 3. A Tour of Go

The tour of go is supported officially by the Go language, and as such has some great high-quality information. Similar to “Go By Example”, the Tour of Go isn’t a course with a certificate or quizzes but is more like beginner-friendly documentation and tutorials.

The tour uses the Go Playground for its computation backend (as mentioned below). The tour is great if you are unsure of whether or not you want to commit to a full course and just want to play around with the language.

๐Ÿ”— 4. Golang University 101

Here John Arundel provides a pick of Go tutorials, conference talks, and other videos that will help you learn the basics of the Go programming language.

๐Ÿ”— Best Communities

๐Ÿ”— 1. The Go Forum

The Go forum is a fairly tight-knit online community with a very go-centric community. It’s a great place to start and interact with other “Gophers”. I would highly recommend joining this forum as well as the other communities listed below.

๐Ÿ”— 2. Reddit - /r/golang

If you know what Reddit is, this is the place for all Go discussion. If you don’t know what Reddit is, I’m sorry.

๐Ÿ”— 3. Gophers Slack

If you are into real-time discussion then the Gophers slack channel is the place to be. There are plenty of awesome channels for all kinds of Go devs. Some of my favorites include:

  • #newbies
  • #jobs
  • #showandtell
  • #performance

๐Ÿ”— 4. #golang on Twitter

๐Ÿ”— 5. Good Gophers list on Twitter

๐Ÿ”— Best Blogs

๐Ÿ”— 1. Boot.dev Go Category

We regularly publish Go-related content and you can follow it by sorting for “golang” on boot.dev. you can also grab the RSS feed here.

๐Ÿ”— 2. The Go Blog

This is the official Golang blog maintained by Go team. Can’t recommend it enough.

๐Ÿ”— 3. Dave Cheney’s Blog

Dave Cheney is a personal favorite of mine. He was one of the first Gophers and has been a prolific writer and fantastic community member.

๐Ÿ”— Best Editors and IDEs

My favorite is VS Code because I use it for everything. That said, here is my full list:

๐Ÿ”— Best Documentation and Tutorials

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