My Personal "Awesome" Go List

"Oh really, Jessie, does it inspire awe?" (Jane, Breaking Bad)

I'm not a fan of most "awesome" lists. Most of them are full of shit and are more about promoting that shit than anything else. My list has two purposes, 1) so I can find my own awesome stuff later and keep it organized when I discover some new way to do something simpler, and 2) so I can curate a truly amazing list of awe-inspiring packages (usually stuff I actual pay my own money to sponsor, it's that good).

My Own Stuff

Here's where I keep track of all the little utilities I make for different things and know where to put them at a glance (not everything should go in util, *cough* "ioutils", right?)

• rwxrob/bonzai - Go commander with command composition, recursive tab completion, rich embedded command documentation (markdown, formatted, pager-aware, color, interactive terminal detection), library of completers (files, dates, calculator) and composable commands (help, config)

• rwxrob/z - my personal, portable Bonzai command tree, use it for ideas to start your own utility monolith command

• rwxrob/scan - universal rune scanner and optional node-tree parser designed for rapid grammar and domain-specific language development with intuitive methods and traceable scan.X expression language interpreter in pure Go for easy code generation from meta languages such as PEGN

• rwxrob/fn - my own collection of map/filter/reduce/each in Go with generics, fn.A functional array type, library of map functions (mapf), map transformations (maps), filters (filt) (you might prefer samber/lo)

• rwxrob/structs - traditional data structures (list, set, stack, node, tree, etc.) implemented with rapid applications development (replacing shell scripts) as design priority

• rwxrob/term - VT100 ANSI terminal escapes, no wasteful function calls just to change colors or terminal state, interactive terminal detection, window size queries, reading user input

• rwxrob/to - library of converter utility functions

• rwxrob/json - supplements encoding/json, includes unmarshaling JSON from HTTP requests into any type that can be passed to json.Unmarshal

• rwxrob/fs - supplements the standard filesystem functions with simplifications and extras

Other Awesome Stuff

I curate this list myself and do not accept pull requests. I'm very picky about what makes it onto it. I am open to suggestions if you'd like to open an issue.

• gdamore/tcell - cell-based view for text terminals, favorite library for creating terminal apps

• rivo/tview - it's like having CSS in your terminal (but not), makes short work of terminal applications that need regularly used widgets

• samber/lo - lodash in Go 1.18 that's 7 times faster than equivalents using reflection

• cavaliercoder/grab - highly concurrent downloads with status updates in Go

Learning Resources

There are a lot of bad Go learning resources out there. Most of them are woefully out of date. Just be really careful. Nothing goes on this this that isn't 100% relevant to modern Go 1.18+.

• Go-Nuts USENET Newsgroup.
  https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts

  This is where the creators and Go project leaders are regularly answering questions and discussing the direction of the language. This resource is far better than Reddit and even the official Go Discord channel (which you can find from https://go.dev). Keep in mind that anything ever written here is permanently saved, forever. I prefer this because all submissions are moderated and people actually take a moment to consider what they write before posting toxic crap (unlike Reddit and Discord, etc.)

• Get Programming with Go
  https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-go

  This book seems like the best for absolute beginners since it assumes you know nothing about programming at all and uses the Go playground and nothing more and doesn't get into the weeds about modules and project management and stuff (which is also its greatest weakness since you have to learn that stuff as well before doing anything significant with it). I intend to use this book (and the author has volunteered to help) during the 2022 Beginner Boost on May 4th.

• Go Code Review Comments
  https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments

• Beej's Guide to Network Programming
  http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

  The book is in C, but so much of Go programming overlaps with that domain --- especially with microservices --- that reading this book should be mandatory for Go developers (or any developer). It covers things like proper UNIX file system semaphores and other architectural design concerns that most people coming to coding from academia or otherwise just won't think about intuitively.