Go, also known as Golang, is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google. It is known for its simplicity, strong static typing, and efficiency, characteristics that allow businesses to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.

From a performance perspective, Go programs are compiled directly to machine code. This compilation not only improves execution speed, but it also eliminates the need for a virtual machine. For this reason, Go applications often demonstrate superior performance in CPU-intensive tasks. Furthermore, Go’s syntax is simple and clean, making the code easy to write, read, maintain, and update.

If you're planning to learn or master Go, there are several skills and prior knowledge that could help you. Familiarity with basic programming concepts, such as variables, loops, functions, and error handling, is highly beneficial. Experience in any statically typed programming language such as Java, C++, or C# could be advantageous since you’d be comfortable with the concept of defining variable types. Some understanding of concurrent programming would also be useful as Go has baked-in support for concurrent process channeling.

Moreover, Go has a strong emphasis on simplicity and productivity for the developers, which means that knowing how to write maintainable and efficient code would be a bonus. Familiarity with containerization technology like Docker could be a plus too since many container-based applications are written in Go.

In the industry, Go is highly utilized in back-end development, data analysis, and infrastructure jobs (like DevOps). Companies look for candidates with expertise in Go for roles like software engineers, data scientists, or systems programmers.

In Summary, Go is a highly efficient language designed for reliably solving large-scale programming tasks. To learn and master this skill, a background in static typed language, understanding of programming basics, concurrent programming along with an eye for writing efficient code will serve as a rich foundation.