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

Creating programs


So far in the book, you have learned how to create and bundle Go code as reusable packages. A package, however, cannot be executed as a standalone program. To create a program (also known as a command), you take a package and define an entry point of execution as follows:

  • Declare (at least one) source file to be part of a special package called main

  • Declare one function name main() to be used as the entry point of the program

The function main takes no argument nor returns any value. The following shows the abbreviated source code for the main package used in the Ohm's Law example (from earlier). It uses the package flag, from Go's standard library, to parse program arguments formatted as flag:

package main 
import ( 
   "flag" 
   "fmt" 
   "os" 
 
   "github.com/vladimirvivien/learning-go/ch06/current" 
   "github.com/vladimirvivien/learning-go/ch06/power" 
   "github.com/vladimirvivien/learning-go/ch06/power/ir" 
   "github.com...