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

The interface type


When you talk to people who have been doing Go for a while, they almost always list the interface as one of their favorite features of the language. The concept of interfaces in Go, similar to other languages, such as Java, is a set of methods that serves as a template to describe behavior. A Go interface, however, is a type specified by the interface{} literal, which is used to list a set of methods that satisfies the interface. The following example shows the shape variable being declared as an interface:

var shape interface { 
    area() float64 
    perim() float64 
} 

In the previous snippet, the shape variable is declared and assigned an unnamed type, interface{area()float64; perim()float64}. Declaring variables with unnamed interface literal types is not really practical. Using idiomatic Go, an interface type is almost always declared as a named type. The previous snippet can be rewritten to use a named interface type, as shown in the following...