Imagine that you like to learn a new programming language, and you start by leveraging what you already know and bridge the gap in learning specific parts of the new language. This book was created on that idea, it starts with using my existing language knowledge and experience to breakdown Go into familiar Ruby concepts and implementations.

The first thing I did to learn Go professionally is to relate to what I know in Ruby. I’ve been a professional Ruby programmer since 2009 and in over a decade of professional experience working as a software engineer, I have worked on multiple programming languages. And proven personally that it’s easier to learn a programming concept from something familiar to me. This helps me to learn the new language faster, which also means being productive much faster as well.

This book was created on my first-hand experience of learning Go from my existing knowledge and experience in Ruby. The book was carefully thought from ground-up, collecting familiar patterns, abstracts, and analogs in Ruby, and relate it with a proper implementation in Go.

By teaching familiar implementations found in Ruby, you will see the correlation between the two languages, establishing familiar concepts to give you enough knowledge to be comfortable with Go and to start programming with it.

Go is an easy language to work with, it’s modern, flexible, powerful and fast. It compiles to binary which gives it an ability for a binary distribution that runs on different platforms, and Go has almost in par performance with C, with package support, memory safety, automatic garbage collection and concurrency built-in. And you get all the nice features from a statically typed language, which IDEs can make use of, and so also improving your development workflow.

Notable open-source projects are built using Go (i.e. Docker, Kubernetes, Etherium and Terraform to name a few), this gives you an advantage because those platforms have APIs and SDKs readily available in Go natively for you to use. And many global companies have been using Go in production (i.e. Google, Netflix, Dropbox, Heroku and Uber to name a few), proving that it has been battle-tested and powerful mature language to based your work into.

Go is created by an interesting mixed of people. Google is the company that funded Go’s development, and the authors of Go who designed the language are mainly Robert Griese- mer (worked on V8 Javascript Engine, Java HotSpot VM, and the Strongtalk system), Rob Pike (known for Plan 9 and UTF-8), and Ken Thompson (known for Unix, C programming language, Plan 9, UTF-8 and Inferno to name a few).

This book will definitely help you get started with Go from your existing Ruby knowledge, and start to hit the ground fast, running!