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

Go identifiers


Go identifiers are used to name program elements including packages, variables, functions, and types. The following summarizes some attributes about identifiers in Go:

  • Identifiers support the Unicode character set

  • The first position of an identifier must be a letter or an underscore

  • Idiomatic Go favors mixed caps (camel case) naming

  • Package-level identifiers must be unique across a given package

  • Identifiers must be unique within a code block (functions, control statements)

The blank identifier

The Go compiler is particularly strict about the use of declared identifiers for variables or packages. The basic rule is: you declare it, you must use it. If you attempt to compile code with unused identifiers such as variables or named packages, the compilers will not be pleased and will fail compilation.

Go allows you to turn off this behavior using the blank identifier, represented by the _ (underscore) character. Any declaration or assignment that uses the blank identifier is not bound...