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Would one be able to pick up go as a first programming language with this?

Did you even click the link? A cursory glance of the first chapter leads me to believe it's targeted toward people new to programming.

I think he's talking more about the language, rather than the book.

You can have a book on APL or Forth that starts out in the first chapter targeting people new to programming, but that does not mean the language itself is the best choice.

Regarding Golang for novice coders, I would say it is an OK choice for a beginner, probably better than starting with Java, but not a good a choice as Python.

I think this chapter is very helpful in answering this question:

http://www.golang-book.com/2/index.htm

Go's "Hello World" is not quite as complex as java, but a lot more complex than Python, in terms of number of concepts to explain.

Comparing "hello worlds" is a fairly poor way of getting an idea of how much complexity/boilerplate you can expect from a language. It's better to compare something more substantial, like quicksort implementations:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Pyt...

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithms/Quicksort#Go

Absolutely! The syntax can be a little confusing at first, but the documentation is very high quality and you can usually get help from #go-nuts on Freenode.

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