User:Soniakeys/Go/How To Read This Book

Organization of the book
We hope you will enjoy reading this book from front to back. Material is presented in an order that builds on previously presented material, so that beginning programmers can follow a steady learning curve. The books starts without assuming that the reader has much familiarity in programming at all, and none whatsoever in Go. By the end of the book, we will have covered the entire language, as specified in the language reference manual, and in the process, covered many basic skills of computer programming.

For more advanced programmers, who will be inclined to skim and skip over material, the book is still organized with this reading style in mind. Part 1 is all introductory material. It leads you right up to the point where you can write your first Go program. If you already have some familiarity with Go, you can probably skip this whole part. Part 2 consists of example programs, roughly in order of increasing difficulty. Each chapter contains one program. It starts with a very brief description of the program, and then shows the program in its entirety. Skim over the program and see if it is interesting or boring, too easy or too hard. If it looks interesting, skim down through the topics presented. Topics presented are those appearing for the first time. If you are interested in some aspect of the the program that is not listed in the topics, it has most likely been covered in a previous exercise. Look back in the Table of Contents and see if you can spot a program where the topic is likely to appear for the first time.

Finally, an index is at the end of the book, to help you locate topics of interest.

Sidebars
Sidebars throughout the book have different kinds of additional information.

Notes in this style give background information of interest to people with very limited computer programming experience, or limited formal computer science education. They provide a little more explanation in cases where they body text breezes through new terms and concepts.

Notes in this style address programmers skilled in other programming languages, pointing out where Go does something in a different way than they might expect.

Notes in this style address the special issue of concurrency, or having a computer do more than one thing at a time. Concurrency has not been been widely addressed in mainstream computing until just recently. As such, techniques are developing rapidly and any specific technique might be new to a programmer of any level of experience.

Typographic conventions
Go source code appears in boxes like this.
 * Italic text is used for the first use of specialized terms, either Go terms or computer programming terms. Of course it is also used as usual for emphasis and clarification, as needed.
 * Bold text is reserved for Go keywords and other exact words of the Go language and the Go standard library. Keywords will appear in bold the first time they are used and other times as needed for clarity.