Learning Go, 3rd Edition

Preface

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the preface of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

I wasn’t sure there should be a third edition of Learning Go.

When the term “vibe coding” was coined in early 2025 by Andrej Karpathy, it was a bit of a joke. By the end of 2025, no one was laughing. LLMs got really good at writing code really fast. Developers were using them for larger and more complicated projects. If anything, the momentum behind automating coding is increasing.

Given this, why would anyone want to write (or read) an updated book on a programming language? Who cares about idiomatic usage and new features when most code is automatically generated? Maybe my time would be better spent writing romance novels before LLMs master those, too.

After some additional thinking, I realized that a book on idiomatic Go might be more needed now than ever before. There are two reasons. The first is that idiomatic code works better. When you write code in an idiomatic way, the Go runtime is able to execute your code more efficiently. If you try to bend Go into something like Java, C++, ...