When can we expect "The Go programming language" book?

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a.m...@abdn.ac.uk

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Jan 25, 2010, 9:36:54 AM1/25/10
to golang-nuts
This is a question to the Go core team:

When can we expect to see "The Go programming language" on
bookshelves? :)

Jason Catena

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Jan 25, 2010, 6:55:56 PM1/25/10
to golang-nuts
I'm not on the core team, but I'll reply anyway.

You might have to wait a while for a dead-tree edition. I'd expect
they would let some time elapse for the language to settle. For
example, C came out in 1972, but didn't get a book from the author
(Ritchie) until 1978. More recently, Haskell 1.0 was released in 1990,
but the committee only wrote the Haskell 98 Report in Feb 1999.

Personally, I'm fine working out my own understanding by creating many
example programs from the language specification, package
documentation, and Effective Go. I'd rather the core team focus on
the language itself. I also don't think it needs a big popularity
push, since people and companies with only peripheral involvement with
the language will suddenly feel qualified after only reading "the
book" to fix all its glaringly obvious defects. Worse, they'll fail
to apply Go in a real-world project based on this limited, one-slim-
book understanding, and loudly preach that the language is no good for
some other application domain than systems programming. So I'd say
let it wait, since enough information seems out there for motivated
programmers to learn, absorb, and practice the language in the
meantime.

On the other hand, I'm sure I'll soon be able to learn it in 1 day,
absorb its intricacies as a dummy, or learn what obscure animal best
represents it (if not a gopher), within the next year or two, since no
publishing niche goes unfilled for long.

I do hope that whatever book they eventually publish has an open
review format like Real World Haskell, which I think benefited
significantly from gathering online user feedback for almost every
paragraph.

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