Sorry, I forgot to hit reply to group in these messages.
On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 8:01 AM, AahanK <
kr...@aahan.me> wrote:
> I have read that beginner programmers can really start learning Go (golang)
> right away, but here are somethings I have also learnt (by the way, I only
> know HTML & CSS at this time).
>
>> It's often recommended that you at least learn JavaScript before learning
>> C, so that it would be easier and you'd understand the language better.
>
>
> I am going to learn JS anyway. What else should I learn before getting into
> Go, so that I can understand what and how the languages does things.
Keep in mind, Javascript does some really stupid things that can end
up being dangerous or hard to debug (at least for a new-comer.) I'd
also suggest Javascript: The Good Parts after you have a general
understanding of the language as you begin to dig deeper. Another
fairly easy language to learn you might want to consider is Lua. It's
used is quite a few games, and that might be satisfying as your
learning to change the behaviour of a game. Not sure if that's really
your primary interest since you've mentioned HTML, CSS, & Javascript.
Oh, and being a web developer myself, currently, keep in mind that
there's usually two other languages you'll have to learn, something
server-side (Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, Perl, whatever) and SQL.
>> Erlang and Scala are often recommended for applications relying on
>> concurrency, distributed computing, and also for developing real-time
>> applications.
>
>
> No language can be very good at everything. And since Go is pretty much a
> general purpose language, I would like to know how it compares to Erlang and
> Scala in aforementioned scenarios. Is Go roughly just as good (if not
> better)?
I can't really speak too much on the subject, but I recall reading
that Erlang supported hot-swapping of code, so in the case of a
server, the server could be upgraded without ever bringing the server
down. That's something that would be extremely difficult to do with Go
(not impossible, but I think most people would just accept the short
downtime rather than trying to patch the executable on the fly.)
> (Also, I've been advised that it's a good idea to read a computer science book
> or two and understand things before getting into programming in the first place.)
That's good advice. The one thing I will point out, that's a pretty
broad statement: "read a computer science book." I'd say more
specifically you'll want to read a book designed to introduce you to
coding in whatever language you're interested in learning and an
algorithms book. Really though, you can get by initially without the
second book, but as you get further along, it's something you'll
definitely want to revisit. The first book will likely include a brief
overview of how things like arrays are stored in memory, what kinds of
conditionals and loops are available, and other specific topics to the
language.