Bartłomiej Płotka - Efficient Go (for lipped prom)

by Bartomiej Potka

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978-1-098-10571-6

[LSI]

Welcome to the pragmatic software development world, where engineers are not afraid of ambitious performance goals. Where the change in requirements or unexpected efficiency issues is handled without stress, where code is optimized tactically and effectively, based on data, yet the codebase is kept simple and easy to read, maintain, and extend. Wait, is this even possible?

Yes, and I will show you how! The good news is that if you bought this book, you are already halfway thereit means you acknowledge the problem and are open to learning more! The bad news is that, while I tried to distill the knowledge to only whats necessary, there are still 11 chapters to go through. I think Efficient Go is unique in this regard as it is not a quick tutorial. Instead, it is a complete guide to writing efficient yet pragmatic software that goes through all aspects I wish I had known when I started my career.

In this book, you will undoubtedly learn a lot about my favorite programming language, Go, and how to optimize it. But dont let the title of this book fool you. While I use Go as the example language to show the optimization mindset and observability patterns, 8 out of 11 chapters of this book are language agnostic. You can use the same techniques to improve software written in any other language like Java, C#, Scala, Python, C++, Rust, or Haskell.

Finally, if you expected a full list of low-level optimization tricks, this is not the right book. Firstly, optimizations do not generalize well. The fact that someone unrolled the loop or used a pointer in their struct field and achieved better efficiency does not mean it will be helpful if we do the same! We will go through some optimization tricks, but I emphasize complete knowledge about efficiency in pragmatic software development instead.

Secondly, low-level dangerous tricks are often not needed. In most cases, an awareness of simple points where your program wastes time and resources is enough to fulfill your efficiency and scalability goals cheaply and effectively. Furthermore, you will learn that in most cases, there is no need to rewrite your program to C++, Rust, or Assembly to have an efficient solution!

Before we start, lets go through the main goals behind this book and why I found it necessary to focus my time on the subject of efficiency. You will also learn how to get the most out of this book and effectively use it in your software development tasks.