I have always appreciated the Go Team investing time on providing the community with the Go Tour. This website is designed to help developers get started in learning the Go programming language. The nice part of the website is that it provides an interactive environment where one can read, write, and run Go examples.

Since the first time I’ve navigated this tour, I’ve had a few problems. First, this tour is not comprehensive both in the number of examples and the content explaining the examples. Second, the content goes from beginner to expert almost instantly. I’ve always wanted to extend and improve the tour, but since this is a Google property, no one except Google employees can work on it.

Because of this, I decided to take all of the Ultimate Go content and put it in a new Go tour. I started by ripping out the tour website code from the Go website and putting that in a new public repo. Then I extracted all the code examples from the Ultimate Go repo and took all the content from the Ultimate Go Notebook and merge the two together.

The result is what I believe is the most extensive Go tour that exists today.

tour.ardanlans.com

Maybe one of the coolest aspects of this new tour is that it’s not controlled by Google. This gives the project flexibility for the community to be involved. For example, the content has been currently translated into 6 languages (English, Greek, Italian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, and Turkish) with 14 more on the way. I’m expecting to see Russian and Indonesian soon with the activity coming from those teams.

Something else that is cool is that each section has exercises with solutions. This gives developers an opportunity to test what they’ve learned and write Go code as they progress through the material. The exercises get more challenging the deeper one goes into the tour.

We integrated search using a cool module called bleve and the search works for all languages. Bleve is able to index all the content amazingly well and provide a comprehensive list of pages with the corresponding examples for any search.

We also added a section called algorithms that will allow community members to add more content to the tour. I think this section can become an extension of the Cracking the Coding Interview book. How cool would that be! I did start some of that work.

I hope you check out this new tour and give it a run. I believe you will find it to be comprehensive, detailed, and most important fun to work through. If you have any ideas or feedback, please leave that as an issue on the repo or send me an email.