100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (opens provider site in a new tab)
Catalogs subtle bugs experienced Go developers still write. Reading it prevents real outages.
Go (Golang)
Simple, fast, concurrent — the language of cloud infrastructure.
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16 picks · 11 free · 12 providers · curated by Rowland Kuru
Editor's intro
Editor's intro
Go was designed at Google to be boring in the best way: a small language, fast compiles, a strong standard library, and concurrency built in. It dominates cloud infrastructure — Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform are all written in it — and it's one of the quickest languages for an experienced programmer to become productive in.
Take the Tour of Go first; it's short. Then read Effective Go and build something with only the standard library before reaching for frameworks. Intermediate picks cover testing, concurrency patterns, and project structure. The advanced resources are for people building high-throughput services or trying to understand exactly what the runtime guarantees.
Start here
A Tour of Go
A Tour of Go is the official, interactive introduction, and it's the right first step whether or not you've programmed before. Every page has a runnable example in the browser, so you can change code and see the result without installing anything. It covers the entire language — types, methods, interfaces, generics, goroutines, and channels — in a few evenings. When you finish, install Go locally, write a small command-line tool, and move on to Go by Example and Effective Go.
This week added
All picks
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Beginner · 5
The whole language, which is small, plus the standard library basics. A few weeks for an experienced programmer.
Go by Example (opens provider site in a new tab)
Annotated example programs for every common task. The page you'll keep open in a tab.
Free
Learn Go with Tests (opens provider site in a new tab)
Teaches Go and test-driven development together. Good habits from the very first chapter.
Free
Go: The Complete Developer's Guide (Golang) (opens partner site in a new tab)
Stephen Grider's diagrams make interfaces, goroutines, and channels intuitive. Best for visual learners.
Paid 30-day refund Partner
Learn Go (opens partner site in a new tab)
Short browser exercises on syntax and basics. A warm-up before building anything real.
Paid Partner
Programming with Google Go Specialization (opens partner site in a new tab)
UC Irvine's structured introduction, including concurrency. Good if you want graded assignments.
Paid Financial aid available Partner
Intermediate · 6
Idiomatic style, testing, concurrency patterns, and building services with the standard library.
Effective Go (opens provider site in a new tab)
How to write Go the way Go programmers expect. Short, and still the style guide everyone cites.
Free
Exercism Go track (opens provider site in a new tab)
Mentored exercises that nudge you toward idiomatic, well-tested Go.
Free
Go Concurrency Patterns (Rob Pike) (opens provider site in a new tab)
Rob Pike's classic talk on goroutines and channels. Still the best mental model for Go concurrency.
Free
The Go Blog (opens provider site in a new tab)
Official deep-dives on generics, errors, modules, and tooling. Read the posts about features you use.
Free
Let's Go (opens provider site in a new tab)
Builds a production-quality web app with only the standard library. Clear, practical, and current.
Paid
The Go Programming Language (Donovan & Kernighan) (opens provider site in a new tab)
The classic Go book. Predates generics, but its chapters on interfaces and concurrency hold up.
Paid
Advanced · 4
The memory model, the spec, and the subtle mistakes that cause production incidents.
100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (opens provider site in a new tab)
Catalogs subtle bugs experienced Go developers still write. Reading it prevents real outages.
Free Summaries free online New
Dave Cheney's blog (opens provider site in a new tab)
Essays on API design, error handling, and performance from a longtime Go contributor.
Free
The Go Memory Model (opens provider site in a new tab)
What's actually guaranteed when goroutines share data. Essential before writing lock-free code.
Free
The Go Programming Language Specification (opens provider site in a new tab)
Short enough to read in an afternoon — rare for a language spec, and worth doing once.
Free