12 Excellent Free Books to Learn Go

Last Updated on April 18, 2024

5. Learning Go by Mike Gieben

This book is aimed at developers with some knowledge of programming languages and how to program.

The best way to learn Go is to create your own programs. Each chapter therefore includes exercises (and answers to exercises) to acquaint you with the language. Each exercise is either easy, intermediate, or difficult.

All exercises in this book work with Go 1, the first stable release of Go.

Chapters cover:

• Introduction – details the lineage of the language and shows the types, variables and control structures.
• Functions – how to make and use functions.
• Packages – functions and data are grouped together in packages. Here you’ll see how to make your own package. How to unit test your package is also described.
• Beyond the basics – learn how to create your own data types and define functions on them (called methods).
• Interfaces – Go does not support Object Orientation in the traditional sense. In Go the central concept is interfaces.
• Concurrency – with the go keyword functions can be started in separate routines (called goroutines). Communication with these goroutines is done via channels.
• Communication – how to create/read/write from and to files. And how to do networking.

This work is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read the book

6. Webapps in Go by Suraj Patil

This book teaches you how to write web applications in Go without using a framework. Each new concept is explained with a valid code example.

Chapters include:

• Variables & Data Structures.
• Control statements and Functions.
• Struct.
• Object-oriented.
• Interface.
• Concurrency.
• Managing the Workspave.
• Web Programming Basics.
• Basic web application.
• Designing our web app.
• Using databases in Go.
• Accessing the database.
• Retrieving Result Sets.
• Modifying Data and Using Transactions.
• Using Prepared Statements.
• Handling Errors.
• Working with NULLs.
• Working with Unknown Columns.
• The connection pool.
• Surprises, Antipatterns and Limitations.
• Database Encapsulation.
• An Example.
• Working with Forms.
• Uploading files.
• Templates.
• Authentication.
• Files.
• Routing.
• Middlewares.
• Building an API.
• Writing a client.
• Unit Testing.
• Version Control Basics.

The book is released under an open source license.

Read the book

7. Let’s learn Go by Big Yuuta

Let’s learn Go is an online resource which aims to introduce people to Go, and have some fun at the same time.

Learn the very basic things about Go. This includes the basic syntax for programs, how to declare variables, pointers, and how to use basic control structure.

The online book then moves on to teaching the reader how to use primitive data types and basic control structures to build composite types and functions. The book later delves deeper into functions and solving real world problems.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Read the book

8. The Little Go Book by Karl Seguin

The Little Go Book is a free introduction to Google’s Go programming language. It’s aimed at developers who might not be quite comfortable with the idea of pointers and static typing. It’s longer than the other Little books, but hopefully still captures that little feeling.

Chapters include:

• The Basics.
• Structures.
• Maps, Arrays and Slices.
• Code Organization and Interfaces.
• Tidbits – talks about a miscellany of Go’s features.
• Concurrency.

The Little Go Book is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Read the book. It’s available in PDF, epub, and mobi. The source code is available from the project’s GitHub repository.

Next page: Page 3 – Go 101 and more books

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Go Bootcamp and more books
Page 2 – Learning Go and more books
Page 3 – Go 101 and more books

All books in this series: