welcome
Thank you for purchasing and reading Go in Practice, 2nd edition. This book is intended for intermediate Go developers looking to broaden their understanding of the language, but if you have experience with other systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++ this book should also take you to the same place.
I first encountered Go shortly after its public release in 2009 as I was working professionally in a mix of bigger object oriented, compiled languages like Java and Delphi and dynamic scripting languages like Python and PHP. Finding dissatisfaction in both areas for different reasons, Go’s promised mix of simplicity and power was compelling. And within a few weeks of working with it, in my opinion it delivered on that promise. Lightning fast builds, robust tooling, and small language footprint scratched all the itches I had at that time, and it soon became my language of choice for working with new programs, particularly those that could benefit from Go’s strong concurrency model.
When I was presented with the 1st edition of this book, I thought its authors did a wonderful job of capturing Go’s most compelling features en route to building and deploying performant web applications to the cloud. But Go has been evolving quickly, so it was important to capture some of the newer changes in the language, as well as round out some of the things that really make Go stand out.