Learning Go Programming

Vladimir Vivien

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784395438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

An insightful guide to learning the Go programming language

About This Book

• Insightful coverage of Go programming syntax, constructs, and idioms to help you understand Go code effectively
• Push your Go skills, with topics such as, data types, channels, concurrency, object-oriented Go, testing, and network programming
• Each chapter provides working code samples that are designed to help reader quickly understand respective topic

Who This Book Is For

If you have prior exposure to programming and are interested in learning the Go programming language, this book is designed for you. It will quickly run you through the basics of programming to let you exploit a number of features offered by Go programming language.

What You Will Learn

• Install and configure the Go development environment to quickly get started with your first program.
• Use the basic elements of the language including source code structure, variables, constants, and control flow primitives to quickly get started with Go
• Gain practical insight into the use of Go's type system including basic and composite types such as maps, slices, and structs.
• Use interface types and techniques such as embedding to create idiomatic object-oriented programs in Go.
• Develop effective functions that are encapsulated in well-organized package structures with support for error handling and panic recovery.
• Implement goroutine, channels, and other concurrency primitives to write highly-concurrent and safe Go code
• Write tested and benchmarked code using Go's built test tools
• Access OS resources by calling C libraries and interact with program environment at runtime

In Detail

The Go programming language has firmly established itself as a favorite for building complex and scalable system applications. Go offers a direct and practical approach to programming that let programmers write correct and predictable code using concurrency idioms and a full-featured standard library.

This is a step-by-step, practical guide full of real world examples to help you get started with Go in no time at all. We start off by understanding the fundamentals of Go, followed by a detailed description of the Go data types, program structures and Maps. After this, you learn how to use Go concurrency idioms to avoid pitfalls and create programs that are exact in expected behavior. Next, you will be familiarized with the tools and libraries that are available in Go for writing and exercising tests, benchmarking, and code coverage.

Finally, you will be able to utilize some of the most important features of GO such as, Network Programming and OS integration to build efficient applications. All the concepts are explained in a crisp and concise manner and by the end of this book; you would be able to create highly efficient programs that you can deploy over cloud.

Style and approach

The book is written to serve as a reader-friendly step-by-step guide to learning the Go programming language. Each topic is sequentially introduced to build on previous materials covered. Every concept is introduced with easy-to-follow code examples that focus on maximizing the understanding of the topic at hand.

Learning Go Programming

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Learning Go Programming

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: October 2016

Production reference: 1201016

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-543-8

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Credits

Authors Vladimir Vivien	Copy Editor Safis Editing
Reviewers Quintessence Anx Parth Desai Abhishek Kumar Chris Schaefer	Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor Akram Hussain	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Manish Nainnani	Indexer Aishwarya Gangawane
Content Development Editor Aishwarya Pandere	Graphics Disha Haria
Technical Editor Mohita Vyas	Production Coordinator Nilesh Mohite

About the Author

Vladimir Vivien (@vladimirvivien) is a software engineer living in the United States. He is a previously published author and has written code in languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python, C to name a few. Vladimir has work in diverse industries including technology, publishing, financial, and healthcare. After years of building enterprise systems using Java, Vladimir came to Go for its simplicity and stayed for its concurrency and fast build time. Vladimir continues to use Go as his primary language to build and create open source software (https://github.com/vladimirivivien).

About the Reviewers

Quintessence Anx. is a superhero (also called as Cloud Engineer) at Stark & Wayne LLC by day and an astronomer with a passion for the Internet of Things by night. She is a chapter leader for her local Girl Develop It, where she empowers women programmers of all levels and abilities through classes and hands-on project experiences, as well as co-founder of City of Light 2.0, an organization working to bring more affordable, reliable, and faster internet to Western New York

Parth Desai is a polygot programmer and architect, and has worked on almost all popular languages like Golang, python, C#. He regularly contributes to various open-source golang projects, like a notification engine called “Khabar”, a http framework written in golang called “Gottp”, and media server called “moire”. He implemented url signing protocol using cryptography in python, from scratch.

He has also written custom single sign on solution (SSO) in c#, with proper implementation of oauth and saml protocols. He also developed pluggable architecture to facilitate easier adding and removing of authentication providers for the SSO. Currently, He is working as a lead backend engineer, and designing and implementing scalable systems in golang and python. You can reach out to him on linkedin at https://in.linkedin.com/in/parthdesai08. Or on his email-id [email protected].

Abhishek Kumar is a technologist in IT Industry since 2010 mainly working in Systems Programming, DevOps Practices and Security. He likes to keep in sync with all domains, paradigms and up-coming technologies to get a wholistic approach for problem solving and planning ahead. He loves to learn new programming languages. Abhishek has been using Golang since 2012. He started a timeseries datastore project in Golang by Sep'2013 and is currently pivoting it. [ @abionic | https://abhishekkr.github.io ]

Want to thank my mother ShivPyari to enable me choose my own path

Chris Schaefer software developer with a passion for learning new things. He enjoys writing code and participating in local community software events.

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Preface

Go is an open source programming language that lets programmers easily build reliable and scalable programs. It does this by offering a simple syntax which makes it fun to write correct and predictable code using concurrency idioms and a robust standard library.

Go has a large and active online community and there are several Go conferences that take place around the world yearly. Starting with https://golang.org/, you will find numerous places on the web that provide documentations, blogs, videos, and slides that cover a wide range of Go-related topics. On GitHub, the story is no different; some of the best known projects that are driving the future of cloud computing, for instance, are written in Go with an ever growing list.

As you would expect, getting started with Go is simple, fast, and well documented. However, “getting into” Go can be more challenging, especially for newcomers from other languages. My first attempt at Go failed. Even after reading the prescribed documentations and going through the tutorials, there was a gap in understanding driven by my own biases from previous programming experiences. Months later I returned to Go and got into it. This time I read the language specs, I read blogs, watch videos, and searched the web for any discussion that provided desi...