Do yourself a favor, and learn the basics of pointers (might as well just read up on C), then move on to Go.
Before you go down the route of buying a paper book, try the interactive tutorial on the golang web site. It's pretty good. There's also a lot of good, and free, reading material on that site to help you learn.
Also, regarding pointers: They're really not that bad, but I understand a lot of people can have trouble with them.
Just realize that in languages like Ruby, and Python, you're never directly working with the computer's memory (as in RAM) - that is abstracted from you.
However, in a language like C, you are. (As an aside, you still aren't directly dealing with it, the operating system abstracts it from your program via the virtual memory system, but you can ignore that for now, and look it up some time when you see fit.) So the first thing you need to make sure is that you understand the difference between stack storage, and heap storage.
Once you understand the heap, and that it is essentially a large block of memory with sequential addresses, you can begin to understand pointers. They are just variables that contain the address of some other variable stored in memory. Languages that support pointers usually give you some syntactic sugar to make working with the "pointed to" object through the pointer easy.
Of course it can all get more complicated, but in summary, give them a shot...you'll gain a much better understanding of many things once you learn them a bit.
Do yourself a favor, and learn the basics of pointers (might as well just read up on C), then move on to Go.
Before you go down the route of buying a paper book, try the interactive tutorial on the golang web site. It's pretty good. There's also a lot of good, and free, reading material on that site to help you learn.
Also, regarding pointers: They're really not that bad, but I understand a lot of people can have trouble with them.
Just realize that in languages like Ruby, and Python, you're never directly working with the computer's memory (as in RAM) - that is abstracted from you.
However, in a language like C, you are. (As an aside, you still aren't directly dealing with it, the operating system abstracts it from your program via the virtual memory system, but you can ignore that for now, and look it up some time when you see fit.) So the first thing you need to make sure is that you understand the difference between stack storage, and heap storage.
Once you understand the heap, and that it is essentially a large block of memory with sequential addresses, you can begin to understand pointers. They are just variables that contain the address of some other variable stored in memory. Languages that support pointers usually give you some syntactic sugar to make working with the "pointed to" object through the pointer easy.
Of course it can all get more complicated, but in summary, give them a shot...you'll gain a much better understanding of many things once you learn them a bit.