Go Mastery 8: Resources and Final Checklist

Official

• Tour of Go: https://go.dev/tour
• Effective Go: https://go.dev/doc/effective_go
• Language spec: https://go.dev/ref/spec (read it fully once; it is short)
• Memory model: https://go.dev/ref/mem
• Go blog: https://go.dev/blog
• Code Review Comments: https://go.dev/wiki/CodeReviewComments
• GC guide: https://go.dev/doc/gc-guide
• Release notes: always skim for each new version

Books (in order)

1. The Go Programming Language (Donovan & Kernighan)
2. Learning Go (Jon Bodner), 2nd edition (covers generics)
3. 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (Teiva Harsanyi), must read
4. Concurrency in Go (Katherine Cox-Buday)
5. Let’s Go and Let’s Go Further (Alex Edwards): web apps and APIs
6. Writing an Interpreter in Go (Thorsten Ball)
7. Efficient Go (Bartłomiej Płotka): performance

Practice sites

• Exercism Go track, Gophercises, Go by Example, LeetCode/AoC in Go
• https://100go.co (summary of 100 Go Mistakes)

Community and reading

• Go Time podcast, GopherCon talks (YouTube), r/golang, Gophers Slack
• Dave Cheney, Russ Cox, Rob Pike talks (“Go Proverbs”, “Concurrency is not Parallelism”)
• Read stdlib source: sync, net/http, io, sort, strings

Final Mastery Checklist

Language

• Explain slice internals and the append gotchas
• Explain the nil-interface problem
• Choose value vs pointer receivers correctly
• Use generics where appropriate and avoid them where not
• Wrap and inspect errors properly

Concurrency

• Build worker pools, pipelines, and graceful shutdown from scratch
• Find and fix a data race, a deadlock, and a goroutine leak
• Use context correctly everywhere

Engineering

• Write table-driven tests, benchmarks, and fuzz tests
• Profile with pprof and optimize based on data
• Structure a module and package cleanly
• Ship a Dockerized service with CI

Mindset

• Can write simple, boring, readable code by default
• Can review someone else’s Go code using the Code Review Comments
• Have read significant parts of the standard library source
• Have shipped or contributed to at least one real project

Visual: the learning loop

flowchart LR
  A["Learn a concept"] --> B["Code an exercise"]
  B --> C["Apply it in a project"]
  C --> D["Read stdlib or open-source code"]
  D --> E["Review and fix weak spots"]
  E --> A

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