Go Programming Language For Dummies

Wei-Meng Lee

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119786214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Languages
• Index: Computer Science

Ready, set, program with Go!

Now is the perfect time to learntheGoProgramming Language. It's one of the most in-demand languages among tech recruitersand developers love its simplicity and power. Go Programming LanguageForDummies is an easy way to add this top job skill to your toolkit.Writtenfor novice and experienced coders alike, this booktraversesbasic syntax, writing functions, organizing data, building packages, and interfacing with APIs.

Go—orGoLang, as it's also known—has proven to be a strong choice for developers creating applications for the cloud-based world we live in.This book will put youon the path to using the language that's created some oftoday's leading webapplications, so you can steer your career where you want to Go!

• Learn how Go works and start writing programs and modules
• Install and implement the most powerful third-party Go packages
• Use Go in conjunction with web services and MySQL databases
• Keep your codebase organized and use Go to structure data

With this book, you canjoin the growing numbers of developers using Go to create 21st century solutions. Step inside to take start writing code that putsdatain users'hands.

Part 1

Getting Started with Go

IN THIS PART …

Write your first Go program.

Discover the basic data types in Go and find out how to declare variables and constants.

Explore the various logical and comparison operators and use them to make decisions.

Understand how looping works and how you can execute code repeatedly.

Use functions to create Go programs that are easy to maintain and understand.

Chapter 1

Hello, Go!

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding why Go is the wave of the future

Installing Go on your computer

Working with an integrated development environment

Writing a Go program and understanding how it works

Seeing how Go compares to other languages

Go is an open-source programming language — one of the fastest-growing programming languages around — released by Google in 2009. It’s a multipurpose programming language specifically designed to build fast, scalable applications.

Go comes from a pretty impressive team of people: Ken Thompson (designer and creator of Unix and C), Rob Pike (cocreator of UTF-8 and Unix format), and Robert Griesemer (a Google engineer). If you’re technically inclined, you may want to check out an article called “Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering” (https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article), which discusses how Go was initially conceived to solve problems at Google.

In this chapter, I explain why learning Go is important for your career, where Go can be used, and how to get started with Go programming.

Go is often referred to as Golang because of its web address: https://golang.org. However, the official name of the language is Go, so that’s how I refer to it throughout this book.

Seeing What Learning Go Can Do for You

You can learn many programming languages today, but Go stands out from the others for a few reasons:

• Go is easy to learn. Go’s syntax makes it a readable language. It has no support for object-oriented programming (OOP), which means you don’t have to worry about classes and inheritance and the complexities that come with that.
  

  Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that is based on the concept of objects (data). Instead of focusing on the functions and logics, OOP organizes software around data, or objects. A key concept in OOP is classes (sort of like templates). Suppose you want to display buttons in your application. Instead of writing the code to display each button individually, you can create a class to represent a generic button and use it to create buttons to display in your application. Each button has its own properties (characteristics). Using the concept of inheritance in OOP, you can create multiple subclasses of the button class to create different types of buttons, such as a rounded button, a rectangular button, and so on.
• Go has fewer features than other programming languages. You don’t have to worry about the best way to solve a problem — there is only one right way to solve a problem in Go. This makes your codebase easy to maintain.
• Go excels in concurrent programming. Go’s support for Goroutines makes it extre...