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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Go Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Channels


When talking about concurrency, one of the natural concerns that arises is that of data safety and synchronization among concurrently executing code. If you have done concurrent programming in languages such as Java or C/C++, you are likely familiar with the, sometimes brittle, choreography required to ensure running threads can safely access shared memory values to achieve communication and synchronization between threads.

This is one area where Go diverges from its C lineage. Instead of having concurrent code communicate by using shared memory locations, Go uses channels as a conduit between running goroutines to communicate and share data. The blog post Effective Go (https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html) has reduced this concept to the following slogan:

Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating.

Note

The concept of channel has its roots in communicating sequential processes (CSP), work done by renowned computer scientist C. A. Hoare, to model...