To be continued

All programmers have their favorite language, libraries, or IDEs. I remember with particular fondness programming with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C in the early 2000s. It was a different time-StackOverflow didn’t exist yet, and Google barely felt like a search engine (now it feels even less like one with “AI Mode”). A good book made all the difference.

There are also languages, frameworks, and IDEs that one simply doesn't like. In my case, I won’t say which. We all have different tastes, and neither languages nor development environments are a matter of faith.

I’ve spent my professional career developing software and training programmers at various startups. For many people, work is just that - work - but I’ve rarely seen it that way. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve had exploitative bosses, and I’ve had to take jobs during major economic crises just to eat. It was that or live under a bridge - but at least for me, developing and teaching others what I had learned was always a blessing.

The other day, a friend asked me, “What’s so special about Zig?” My answer was: nothing… and everything. It all depends on how you experience it. Maybe for you, it’ll just be another language. Maybe it’ll become your favorite. Right now, at the start of 2026, I don’t know if you’ll find a job in Zig. Maybe that’s actually its strength: you can use it for your own projects, whether for pure recreational programming, to build your “Next Big Thing” (your own startup), to learn a low-level language, or all of the above.

You can read this first book for free in HTML format at zenofzig.com/book.  You can also buy it as a PDF on leanpub.com/zenofzig. I understand if now’s not the right time or if you’re just not in the mood. If you do choose to buy it, you’ll get a discount on the next five volumes in the series. I’m currently working on the next part:

- Zen of Zig II: Command Line Mayhem

   Command-line tools and terminal applications.

Most of all, I wish you a great journey learning Zig and success in whatever you set out to do.