Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Overview of this book

Go is the new systems programming language for Linux and Unix systems. It is also the language in which some of the most prominent cloud-level systems have been written, such as Docker. Where C programmers used to rule, Go programmers are in demand to write highly optimized systems programming code. Created by some of the original designers of C and Unix, Go expands the systems programmers toolkit and adds a mature, clear programming language. Traditional system applications become easier to write since pointers are not relevant and garbage collection has taken away the most problematic area for low-level systems code: memory management. This book opens up the world of high-performance Unix system applications to the beginning Go programmer. It does not get stuck on single systems or even system types, but tries to expand the original teachings from Unix system level programming to all types of servers, the cloud, and the web.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary

You learned many things in this chapter, including getting user input and processing command-line arguments. You familiarized yourself with the basic Go structures and you created a Go program that generates random numbers. Try to do the offered exercises and do not get discouraged if you fail in some of them.

The next chapter will talk about many advanced Go features, including error handling, pattern matching, regular expressions, reflection, unsafe code, calling C code from Go, and the strace(1) command-line utility. I will compare Go with other programming languages and give you practical advice in order to avoid some common Go pitfalls.