I picked up Build Websites with Hugo because I’m a PragProg loyalist with
plans to revive my old blog, and if they have a book on something I’m using, I
like to have an opinion on it. My opinion is that it’s fine, but barely. The
book is from 2020, and Hugo has changed enough since then that half the
examples either don’t work or generate deprecation warnings. I was running Hugo
0.164 against a book written for 0.68, and the scaffolding generated by
hugo new theme is completely different now, so it actively conflicted with
the book’s instructions at nearly every step.
Worse, the entire book has you building a custom theme from scratch, which is a reasonable way to teach, except that anyone graduating from this book is going to immediately throw that theme away for something maintained by people who actually know CSS, so you spend 200 pages building something disposable. What you do get out of it is an understanding of how Hugo thinks, with the template hierarchy, partials, taxonomies, front matter, and the asset pipeline, and that did turn out to be worth something, so just go in knowing you’re reading it for the concepts and not the site. Honestly, you’d probably learn as much in an afternoon of playing with Hugo directly and asking an AI assistant when you get stuck.
There wasn’t much else in it worth remembering, except maybe how to make a cool “This page will take X minutes to read” summary.