You might have seen this gist make the rounds about keeping a programming journal. Writing things down is important. Write on paper, in a bug tracker, on your hand, whatever. Just write it down. Writing things down is important for two reasons: It helps you remember things. Your brain has a finite capacity, and if something is written down, especially in a “public” place, it probably won’t get forgotten. It keeps you sane. If you just try to rem…

Wow, that was a big one. Late Wednesday night I finished the crypto chapter in Go, The Standard Library, and it's a doozy. It pushes the size of the book up to 100 pages. Think about that. It's only 7 out of 40 chapters complete. It's kind of freaking me out. There's a mailing list, Twitter account, and a feedback form, so head over to The Standard Library for all things related to that. You can buy the book for only $39, and please do, because …

Since I posted about the starting at the beginning of April, naturally I've made some progress. I haven't been posting updates here because there's the mailing list and Twitter for that, but I've got five chapters out so it's time for a blog update. I'm going through the packages alphabetically so archive, bufio, builtin, bytes, and compress are ready to go. Head over to http://thestandardlibrary.com/go.html to subscribe to the mailing list and …

It's actually happening. I'm writing a book. I saw a gap in the programming world. Most languages have an extensive standard library and core that a lot of programmers are missing out on. I was doing things the long way because I just didn't know the standard library had something built in. I'm trying to fill that gap with deep looks at the standard library of your favorite language. My first step is called Go, The Standard Library, about the ne…