Book Reviews

7 min read


Book Review: Go For Beginners

This well-written, quick intro to Go for professional developers has some really strong points, but some important down sides, too.


Constants don't overflow

Constants … Numeric constants represent exact values of arbitrary precision and do not overflow. Consequently, there are no constants denoting the IEEE-754 negative zero, infinity, and not-a-number values. Now this is a very interesting thing about constants in Go, and it’s something that confuses a lot of people. So let’s play around with this one a bit. If you’re experienced with compiled languages, you’re probably already familiar with numeric overflows.

Book Reviews

7 min read


Book Review: Learning GO Programming

Very well organized, reasonable content, but the rampant grammatical errors are terribly distracting.


Constants at compile time

Yesterday I made a passing comment in the last code example: Although x is not a constant, the result of len(x) is, because it is known at compile time. I want to dive into this aspect of constants in Go today. In Go (or at least most, if not all implementations of Go) a constant is logically replaced during compilation. This can be a useful mental shortcut when trying to determine whether a given expression can be a constant or not.

Book Reviews

8 min read


Book Review: Beginning Go Programming

Full of factual errors, poorly edited, poorly organized. All around a bad book.


Constants

Constants There are boolean constants, rune constants, integer constants, floating-point constants, complex constants, and string constants. Rune, integer, floating-point, and complex constants are collectively called numeric constants. So there we have it. A comprehensive list of the available constant types in Go. And all but boolean and string constants are numeric. Notice that none of the composite types can be constants in Go. You can’t have a constant array, slice, struct, or interface.

Book Reviews

5 min read


Book Review: Learning Go

The focus for Learning Go isn't just how to write programs in Go; it's how to write Go idiomatically.

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Lexical elements: Interpreted string literals

A quick note that episode 2 of Cup o’ Go dropped today. Check it out! Picking up where we left off last week, we’re discussing string literals. Last week we talked about raw string literals, which leaves us now with interpreted string literals. To recap: String literals A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals.

Book Reviews

6 min read


Book Review: Go Programming In Easy Steps

Is "Go Programming In Easy Steps" the way to learn Go in 2023?


Lexical elements: Raw string literals

Now that I’ve bored you to death with more about rune literals than you ever asked, let’s take things up a level, and talk about strings. String literals A string literal represents a string constant obtained from concatenating a sequence of characters. There are two forms: raw string literals and interpreted string literals. Raw string literals are character sequences between back quotes, as in `foo`. Within the quotes, any character may appear except back quote.

Book Reviews

7 min read


Book Review: Go Programming Language for Dummies

I review the book "Go Programming Language for Dummies" and offer my recommendation whether you should buy this book to learn Go.