Gopher Reading List

Here is a reading list of blog posts about Go. It aspires to include only the most useful and relevant material that anyone writing Go should eventually read. By definition, the list is a work in progress.

Rather than being comprehensive, the list is a curated selection fixed at 200 entries.

Go is growing fast and so are the number of blog posts about it. If an interested reader knows of a great post not on this list, please open an issue with a link to the post. Not every blog post linked in an issue will make its way into the list. Nonetheless, the issue list (both open and closed) is a good source of additional reading material.

NOTE: Any new additions will need to replace something else on the list to keep it at a fixed length.

Start Here

• Why should you learn Go?
• An Intro to Go for non-Go developers
• How to Write Go Code
• A Tour of Go
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Go by Example
• Go 101

See Go Books for a list of books, both free and paid.

Beginner

Some basics

• Understand Go pointers in less than 800 words or your money back
• Don't fear the pointer
• Channel Axioms
• Golang channels tutorial
• Common Gotchas in Go
• 50 Shades of Go: Traps, Gotchas, and Common Mistakes for New Golang Devs
• Slices from the ground up
• 6 Tips for Using Strings in Go
• Go Defer Simplified with Practical Visuals
• How to Use Go Interfaces
• Different Ways to Initialize Go structs

Worth reading, again and again

• Effective Go
• Visualizing Concurrency in Go
• Strings, bytes, runes and characters in Go
• Arrays, slices (and strings): The mechanics of 'append'

Organization and Style

• Practical Go: Real world advice for writing maintainable Go programs
• Less is exponentially more
• Go Proverbs
• Code Review Comments
• Google Go Style Guide
• Idiomatic Go
• Error handling and Go
• Working with Errors in Go 1.13
• Simple Go project layout with modules
• Structuring Tests in Go
• Standard Package Layout
• Packages as layers, not groups
• Structuring Applications in Go
• Style guideline for Go packages
• Package names
• What's in a name (slides)

Web

• Creating My First Web Application with Go
• Making a RESTful JSON API in Go
• Serving static files and web apps in Go
• An Intro To Templates in Go
• JSON APIs Are Just Web Applications
• Writing middleware in #golang and how Go makes it so much fun
• Go and JSON
• Accessing data in Go
• How to Use //go:embed

Concurrency

• Learning Go's Concurrency Through Illustrations
• Gos append is not always thread safe

Go Modules

• Introduction to Go modules
• Using Go Modules
• Modules Part 01: Why And What

Intermediate

Code Design

• Go best practices, six years in
• Aspects of a good Go library
• Solid Go Design
• Go for Industrial Programming
• Failure is your Domain
• What accept interfaces, return structs means in Go
• Pitfalls of context values and how to avoid or mitigate them in Go
• How to organize the go struct, in order to save memory
• Loose Coupling in Go lang
• Self-referential functions and the design of options
• Functional Options for Friendly APIs
• Functional Options on Steroids
• Error handling in Upspin
• Passing Loggers in Go: Golang Logging Best Practices
• errors.Join defer

Concurrency

• Concurrency Patterns
• Stopping goroutines
• Make Ctrl+C cancel the context.Context
• How to correctly use context.Context in Go 1.7
• Using contexts to avoid leaking goroutines
• Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines and cancellation
• Tutorial: Synchronizing State with Mutexes in Go
• Context and Cancellation of goroutines
• Dancing with Go's Mutexes
• GoRoutines, Channels, and Proper Exits
• How to Block Forever in Go
• Mutex Profile
• Sane Concurrency with Go
• Error handling patterns in Go
• Does the race detector catch all data races?
• Interesting ways of using Go channels
• Code Review Checklist: Go concurrency
• The Pros of Conds
• Go concurrency guide

Testing

• Testing Web Apps in Go
• An Introduction to Testing in Go
• 5 simple tips and tricks for writing unit tests in #golang
• 5 Advanced Testing Techniques in Go
• Interfaces and Composition for Effective Unit Testing in Golang
• Go Testing Technique: Testing JSON HTTP Requests
• Testing Your (HTTP) Handlers in Go
• Learn Go with tests
• Lesser-Known Features of Go Test
• When Writing Unit Tests, Dont Use Mocks
• Property-based testing in Go
• Functional table-driven tests in Go
• Advanced Testing in Go

Web

• Go for Cloud
• Exposing Go on the Internet
• The complete guide to Go net/http timeouts
• HTTP(S) Proxy in Golang in less than 100 lines of code
• Write a Kubernetes-ready service from zero step-by-step
• A brief intro of TCP keep-alive in Gos HTTP implementation
• Build a Web Crawler in Go
• Your pprof is showing: IPv4 scans reveal exposed net/http/pprof endpoints:
• HTTP Request Contexts & Go
• Using Object-Oriented Web Servers in Go
• Handle HTTP Request Errors in Go
• Don't use Go's default HTTP client (in production)
• Writing an API Client in Go
• Seeking around in an HTTP object
• Using Functions Inside Go Templates
• Practical Persistence in Go: Organising Database Access
• How I write Go HTTP services after seven years
• Make resilient Go net/http servers using timeouts, deadlines and context cancellation
• Life of an HTTP request in a Go server
• Gotchas in the Go Network Packages Defaults
• Graceful shutdown of a TCP server in Go
• How to handle signals with Go to graceful shutdown HTTP server

JSON

• Go JSON Cookbook
• Custom JSON Marshalling in Go
• Advanced Encoding and Decoding Techniques
• Go json.Decoder ConsideredHarmful

Tools

• Forward Compatibility and Toolchain Management in Go 1.21
• An Overview of Go's Tooling
• Go tooling essentials
• Profiling Go Programs
• Statically compiling Go programs
• Tutorial: Getting started with fuzzing
• Go mod's lesser known features
• A comprehensive guide to go generate

Trivia

• 10 things you (probably) don't know about Go
• Advanced Go Tips And Tricks
• Golang slices gotcha
• a[low:high:max] in Golang A Rare Slice Trick

Performance

• Diagnostics
• Profiling Go
• Five things that make Go fast
• Debugging Go Applications using Delve
• Easy memory-saving tricks in Go
• Common Pitfalls in Go Benchmarking

Language

• Golang: pass by pointer vs pass by value
• There is no pass-by-reference in Go
• Variadic functions in Go
• Function Types in Go (golang)
• research!rsc: Go Data Structures
• The Relationship Between Interfaces and Reflection
• Darker Corners of Go

Generics

• An Introduction to Generics
• When to Use Generics in Go?
• Faster sorting with Go generics

Miscellaneous

• Always Be Closing
• Don't defer Close() on writable files
• How to Use go:generate
• Writing worker queues, in Go
• Job Queues in Go - OpsDash
• Vanity Go Import Paths
• Handling Errors from Deferred Functions in Go
• Bitmasks for nicer APIs
• A Comprehensive Guide to Structured Logging in Go

Advanced

Low Level Concerns

• The Go Memory Model
• Go's work-stealing scheduler
• The Go scheduler
• Illustrated Tales of Go Runtime Scheduler
• Go: Asynchronous Preemption
• Go Assembly by Example
• Address Alignments in Go
• Hacking the Scheduler
• Scheduling In Go - Part II
• Anatomy of a function call in Go
• Scheduler Tracing in Go
• unsafe.Pointer and system calls
• Type-Unsafe Pointers
• Looking at your programs structure in Go 1.7
• Managing Syscall Overhead with crypto/rand
• Go: Introduction to the Escape Analysis
• Monkey Patching in Go
• Interface method calls with the Go register ABI

Performance

• Allocation Efficiency in High-Performance Go Services
• Handling 1 Million Requests per Minute with Go
• Go code refactoring : the 23x performance hunt
• A Million WebSockets and Go
• go-perfbook
• Simple techniques to optimise Go programs
• High Performance Go Workshop
• Reducing Memory Allocations in Golang

Garbage Collection

• A Guide to the Go Garbage Collector
• Getting to Go: The Journey of Go's Garbage Collector
• Avoiding high GC overhead with large heaps
• How to Optimize Garbage Collection in Go
• Garbage Collection in Go

Concurrency

• Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns
• The X-Files: Avoiding Concurrency Boilerplate with golang.org/x/sync
• Golang lock-free values with atomic.Value
• Go Concurrency Patterns: Context
• Go Concurrency Patterns: Timing out, moving on
• Concurrency, Goroutines and GOMAXPROCS
• Data Race Patterns in Go