Book Image

Learning Go Programming

Book Image

Learning Go Programming

Overview of this book

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.

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Learning Go Programming
Oct, 2016 | 348 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Go Programming
Learning Go Programming
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
A First Step in Go
A First Step in Go
The Go programming language
Playing with Go
Your first Go program
Go in a nutshell
Summary
2
Go Language Essentials
Go Language Essentials
The Go source file
Go identifiers
Go variables
Go constants
Go operators
Summary
3
Go Control Flow
Go Control Flow
The if statement
Switch statements
The for statements
The break, continue, and goto statements
Summary
4
Data Types
Data Types
Go types
Numeric types
Boolean type
Rune and string types
Pointers
Type declaration
Type conversion
Summary
5
Functions in Go
Functions in Go
Go functions
Passing parameter values
Higher-order functions
Error signaling and handling
Deferring function calls
Function panic and recovery
Summary
6
Go Packages and Programs
Go Packages and Programs
The Go package
Creating packages
Building packages
Package visibility
Importing package
Package initialization
Creating programs
Remote packages
Summary
7
Composite Types
Composite Types
The array type
The slice type
The map type
The struct type
Summary
8
Methods, Interfaces, and Objects
Methods, Interfaces, and Objects
Go methods
Objects in Go
The interface type
Type assertion
Summary
9
Concurrency
Concurrency
Goroutines
Channels
Writing concurrent programs
The sync package
Detecting race conditions
Parallelism in Go
Summary
10
Data IO in Go
Data IO in Go
IO with readers and writers
The io.Reader interface
The io.Writer interface
Working with the io package
Working with files
Formatted IO with fmt
Buffered IO
In-memory IO
Encoding and decoding data
Summary
11
Writing Networked Services
Writing Networked Services
The net package
A TCP API server
The HTTP package
A JSON API server
Summary
12
Code Testing
Code Testing
The Go test tool
Writing Go tests
HTTP testing
Test coverage
Code benchmark
Summary

Rune and string types

In order to start our discussion about the rune and string types, some background context is in order. Go can treat character and string literal constants in its source code as Unicode. It is a global standard whose goal is to catalog symbols for known writing systems by assigning a numerical value (known as code point) to each character.

By default, Go inherently supports UTF-8 which is an efficient way of encoding and storing Unicode numerical values. That is all the background needed to continue with this subject. No further detail will be discussed as it is beyond the scope of this book.

The rune

So, what exactly does the rune type have to do with Unicode? The rune is an alias for the int32 type. It is specifically intended to store Unicode integer values encoded as UTF-8. Let us take a look at some rune literals in the following program:

golang.fyi/ch04/rune.go

Each variable in the previous program stores a Unicode character as a rune value. In Go, the rune may be specified...

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