Reader’s Digest

I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is July of 2021 so far. Enjoy.

Ultimate Go

This book is a culmination of Bill Kennedy’s Ultimate Go course and notes which were spawned from them by Hoanh An. Bill Kennedy set out to put everything together and create a notebook which can be read and followed like the personal notes of a student.

It contains a great many code examples which has been reviewed again and again ( by me too! ) to ensure that there are no bugs in them, and that they adhere to a high standard.

The book follows An as he follows the Ultimate Go course and takes notes from them. The course talks about the language intricacies, inner workings of the scheduler, the GC, memory and CPU profiles usage and many, many more things. It also touches up on the now incoming type parameters, aka generics, in Go 1.18. It’s a great touch in the book as it will eventually be a standard and better to begin understanding it sooner rather than later.

The first chapter sets up the reader’s mind frame to the unusual way the book is written ( in first person ). With a lovely and inspiring set of quotes from a great many people big in the tech industry.

I encourage everyone to have a read of it!

Go with Domain

This book can be obtained by subscribing to ThreeDots’ newsletter here.

It’s a lengthy book describing a journey the authors (Milosz Smolka, Robert Laszczak) took in order to improve software and therefor, the World. It’s a great journey, but it’s mostly about using DDD in a pragmatic way in Go.

My feelings about this book are mixed. On one hand, Go doesn’t like convoluted patterns, and DDD IS convoluted. On the other hand, patterns are there for a reason. They solve real problems in a generic way which has been already solved before us a hundred thousand times. And Go has patterns, just different ones than other languages. And that’s fine. Go promotes simple implementations and simple solutions.

However, there is only so far that you can get with simple. Eventually, you’ll be in an enterprise environment working with a 100 other people and will try to put something together using poor communications, that’s bound to fail. DDD at least offers the ubiquitous language which provides common language across everyone who uses the product. That’s definitely a benefit. And Event storming is a good idea IMHO.

I offer this. It’s a good read. It’s incomplete as of this writing, missing the last few chapters. Everyone who reads it should decide for themselves if the patterns offered make sense. But for sure, it should not be dismissed too hastily.

The authors are aware of the Go communities apprehension against bloated patterns and offer pragmatic solutions in many cases. I really like that. It’s not a 1:1 copy try of DDD, it’s a clever try in adapting it and molding it to Go.

Texas Reckoners - Lux

This one is again from Brandon Sanderson. I listened to it via an AudioBook. It was quiet enjoyable! I already listened to all three of the Steelheart Reckoners and it was awesome to hear some references to that. The end ties the timeline together, Calamity disappears from the sky, and it’s left open with a massive Cliff Hanger. I’m looking forward to listening to #2.

The story follows a group of Texas reckoners which is another cell that Prof created. A fresh recruit call Jax is taken into the care of this group and molded into a formidable Epic assassin. His brother is killed by an Epic call Lovestruck in the early days and his whole family died when in Steelheart the bomber Epic destroyed a city.

He is set out for revenge to take down Lux, a floating city governed by an Epic called Lifeforce. He has the ability to make anyone immortal. The floating city plunders around Texas, so the Reckoners set out to destroy it!

Conclusion

That’s it for these months. Next month I’m planning on finishing two Go related books hopefully and will write some reviews about those.

And as always, Thanks for reading, Gergely.