This was exactly how I did it. The Effective Go part took me longer, since I actually jumped into porting a couple of small ruby libraries I picked (not mine, just ones I was familiar with) so that had me jumping to and from the book to the terminal/editor, so it probably took me like 5 days to port both libraries into Go code that I was happy with.

After that I had also read enough online to be familiar with the tools and the environment. Go is a really small language, but the ecosystem is rich.