Book Image

Network Automation with Go

By : Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin
Book Image

Network Automation with Go

By: Nicolas Leiva, Michael Kashin

Overview of this book

Go’s built-in first-class concurrency mechanisms make it an ideal choice for long-lived low-bandwidth I/O operations, which are typical requirements of network automation and network operations applications. This book provides a quick overview of Go and hands-on examples within it to help you become proficient with Go for network automation. It’s a practical guide that will teach you how to automate common network operations and build systems using Go. The first part takes you through a general overview, use cases, strengths, and inherent weaknesses of Go to prepare you for a deeper dive into network automation, which is heavily reliant on understanding this programming language. You’ll explore the common network automation areas and challenges, what language features you can use in each of those areas, and the common software tools and packages. To help deepen your understanding, you’ll also work through real-world network automation problems and apply hands-on solutions to them. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with Go and have a solid grasp on network automation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Go Programming Language
6
Part 2: Common Tools and Frameworks
10
Part 3: Interacting with APIs

Go’s Type System

Go is a statically typed language, which means the compiler must know the types of all variables to build a program. The compiler looks for a special variable declaration signature and allocates enough memory to store its value.

func main() {
    var n int
    n = 42
}

By default, Go initializes the memory with the zero value corresponding to its type. In the preceding example, we declare `n`, which has an initial value of 0. We later assign a new value of 42.

Table 3.1 – Zero Values

As its name suggests, a variable can change its value, but only as long as its type remains the same. If you try to assign a value with a different type or re-declare a variable, the compiler complains with an appropriate error message.

If we appended a line with n = "Hello" to the last code example, the program wouldn't compile, and it would return the following error message: cannot use "Hello" (type untyped string) as type int in assignment.

You...