Is your goal to learn go (or other language), or to accomplish a specific task (both valid and wonderful goals!)? The reason I ask because if it's the second, I've become dramatically more productive by really learning shell. Just as an example:

  comic_number=321;  curl -L http://xkcd.com/"$comic_number"/info.0.json | jq '{title, number: .num, title, date: "\(.day)-\(.month)-\(.year)", description: .alt, image: .img}'

That took maybe a minute for me to write, vs. like 20 or so minutes for Go. I personally can get stuck in a such a paralysis of doing things the "right" way in a "real" language. So, it's nice to be able to bang out a prototype super quickly and then iterate from there if I want.

edit: getting them all, because who can resist some fun code golf:

  yes | awk 'BEGIN{count=1} {print count++;}' | head -n 2311 | xargs -I {} curl -sL http://xkcd.com/"{}"/info.0.json | jq '{title, number: .num, title, date: "\(.day)-\(.month)-\(.year)", description: .alt, image: .img}'