20 Best Golang Books You Should Read (2024)

Golang Books

Go is a statically typed programming language that is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient.

This is an up-to-date list of recommended books for learning Golang.

1.The Go Programming Language

Not a book for the impatient; but if you're a novice, this is the book to trust to take you through from beginner to competence and well on your way to proficiency. I've been a professional C/UNIX developer since the mid-80's and Java and Python for the past 20 years. Don't get me wrong: Go is not a difficult language to learn; but I thought I could pick it up in a few hours. There are serious ground-shattering differences between Go and everything else. Although it borrows liberally from C, Java, and Python - it really is a different approach because the language authors aren't afraid to address the shortcomings made in those and other languages for the sake of conforming with the ideas long held to be "norms".

2.Go in Practice

Go in Practice guides you through dozens of real-world techniques in key areas. Following a cookbook-style Problem/Solution/Discussion format, this practical handbook builds on the foundational concepts of the Go language and introduces specific strategies you can use in your day-to-day applications. You'll learn techniques for building web services, using Go in the cloud, testing and debugging, routing, network applications, and much more. After finishing this book, you will be ready to build sophisticated cloud-native Go applications.

3.Concurrency in Go

The author's approach is clear, concise and extremely well organized. Some great examples in the book take the time to show a basic approach and how to grow it into well-formed, concurrent process. With that in mind, that is how the book is organized as well: taking a simplistic approach and growing into a much more sophisticated solution. This is the way many excellent high level engineers and architects I know work and how I try to work. There's even some unit testing and benchmarking code in there that helps show how to fit some of the pieces together.

4.Go Web Programming

Go Web Programming teaches you how to build web applications in Go using modern design principles. You'll learn how to implement the dependency injection design pattern for writing test doubles, use concurrency in web applications, and create and consume JSON and XML in web services. Along the way, you'll discover how to minimize your dependence on external frameworks, and you'll pick up valuable productivity techniques for testing and deploying your applications.

5.Go in Action

Go in Action is for any intermediate-level developer who has experience with other programming languages and wants a jump-start in learning Go or a more thorough understanding of the language and its internals. This book provides an intensive, comprehensive, and idiomatic view of Go. It focuses on the specification and implementation of the language, including topics like language syntax, Go's type system, concurrency, channels, and testing.

6.Head First Go

Go makes it easy to build software that’s simple, reliable, and efficient. Andthis book makes it easy for programmers like you to get started. Googledesigned Go for high-performance networking and multiprocessing, but—like Python and JavaScript—the language is easy to read and use. With thispractical hands-on guide, you’ll learn how to write Go code using clearexamples that demonstrate the language in action. Best of all, you’ll understandthe conventions and techniques that employers want entry-level Godevelopers to know.

7.Mastering Go

Often referred to (incorrectly) as Golang, Go is the high-performance systems language of the future. Mastering Go, Second Edition helps you become a productive expert Go programmer, building and improving on the groundbreaking first edition.

8.Get Programming with Go

Hobbyists, newcomers, and professionals alike can benefit from a fast, modern language; all you need is the right resource! Get Programming with Go provides a hands-on introduction to Go language fundamentals, serving as a solid foundation for your future programming projects. You'll master Go syntax, work with types and functions, and explore bigger ideas like state and concurrency, with plenty of exercises to lock in what you learn.

9.Black Hat Go

Black Hat Go explores the darker side of Go, the popular programming language revered by hackers for its simplicity, efficiency, and reliability. It provides an arsenal of practical tactics from the perspective of security practitioners and hackers to help you test your systems, build and automate tools to fit your needs, and improve your offensive security skillset, all using the power of Go.

10.Writing An Interpreter In Go

This is probably the 9th book about compilers I bought and read in the last two years... And I loved it. The author is really honest with his introduction on why he wrote the book and what is expected to cover on it so you are completely warned from the beginning.

This is not a book to learn Go (there are better books about it) neither a book about how to design a programming language (there are many other academic books about it) or a book about different parsing algorithms (for that I recommend Language Implementation Patterns by Parr) but it is a book about writing an interpreter in Go, exactly as the title says, and I love it.

11.Go Web Programming

Go Web Programming teaches you how to build web applications in Go using modern design principles. You'll learn how to implement the dependency injection design pattern for writing test doubles, use concurrency in web applications, and create and consume JSON and XML in web services. Along the way, you'll discover how to minimize your dependence on external frameworks, and you'll pick up valuable productivity techniques for testing and deploying your applications.

12.Go Programming Cookbook

This Go cookbook helps you put into practice the advanced concepts and libraries that Golang offers. The recipes in the book follow best practices such as documentation, testing, and vendoring with Go modules, as well as performing clean abstractions using interfaces. You'll learn how code works and the common pitfalls to watch out for. The book covers basic type and error handling, and then moves on to explore applications, such as websites, command-line tools, and filesystems, that interact with users. You'll even get to grips with parallelism, distributed systems, and performance tuning.

13.Learning Go Programming

This is a step-by-step, practical guide full of real world examples to help you get started with Go in no time at all. We start off by understanding the fundamentals of Go, followed by a detailed description of the Go data types, program structures and Maps. After this, you learn how to use Go concurrency idioms to avoid pitfalls and create programs that are exact in expected behavior. Next, you will be familiarized with the tools and libraries that are available in Go for writing and exercising tests, benchmarking, and code coverage.

14.The Way to Go

This book provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of the new open source programming language Go (in its first stable and maintained release Go 1) from Google.

15.Sams Teach Yourself Go in 24 Hours

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, Sams Teach Yourself Go in 24 Hours will help new and experienced programmers build software that’s simpler, more reliable, and far more scalable. This book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach guides you from setting up your environment through testing and deploying powerful solutions. Using practical examples, expert Go developer George Ornbo walks you through Go’s fundamental constructs, demonstrates its breakthrough features for concurrent and network programming, and illuminates Go’s powerful new idioms. Every lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, giving you a rock-solid foundation for real-world success.

16.Deep Learning and the Game of Go

Deep Learning and the Game of Go teaches you how to apply the power of deep learning to complex reasoning tasks by building a Go-playing AI. After exposing you to the foundations of machine and deep learning, you'll use Python to build a bot and then teach it the rules of the game.

17.Programming in Go

Both a tutorial and a language reference, Programming in Go brings together all the knowledge you need to evaluate Go, think in Go, and write high-performance software with Go. Summerfield presents multiple idiom comparisons showing exactly how Go improves upon older languages, calling special attention to Go’s key innovations. Along the way, he explains everything from the absolute basics through Go’s lock-free channel-based concurrency and its flexible and unusual duck-typing type-safe approach to object-orientation.

18.Level Up Your Web Apps With Go

This book gives you all you need to use Go in your web applications. You'll learn the basic concepts - language structures, the standard library, and Go tools - then tackle more advanced features like concurrency concepts, testing methodologies, and package structures.

19.Go Programming Language Phrasebook

This guide gives you the code “phrases” you need to quickly and effectively complete a wide variety of projects with Go, today’s most exciting new programming language.

20.Writing A Compiler In Go

The book picks up where the previous book, "Writing an Interpreter in Go", left off. The author takes an AST tree produced by the same parser that serves the Interpreter, and builds a bytecode out of it to later feed into a bytecode execution engine that is built in parallel. The book gives the reader all necessary background about the workings of a stack machine, and goes on to building one. The reader then learns about stack maintenance during normal execution flow, as well as calling functions, where the importance of agreeing on a calling convention (passing arguments, returning a value, allocating local variables) is paramount. Another important concept is delayed patching of the code that's been generated to get the conditional and unconditional jump instructions to have correct operands - those come into play while processing if() conditions. At times, the code seems somewhat hackish, but still illustrates the points author tries to explain.