Book Image

Mastering Go

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
Book Image

Mastering Go

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

<p>Often referred to as Golang (albeit wrongly), the Go programming language is really making strides thanks to some masterclass developments, architected by the greatest programming minds. Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke has been recently quoted as saying “Go will be the server language of the future.” Go programmers are in high demand, but - more controversially - Go takes the stage where C and Unix programmers previously led the way.</p> <p>The growth of the Go language has seen it become the means by which systems, networking, web, and cloud applications are implemented. If you’re a Go programmer, you’ll already know some Go syntax and will have written some small projects. However, most Go programmers face the difficulty of having to integrate their Golang skills with production code. With Mastering Go, the author shows you just how to tackle this problem. You'll benefit by mastering the use of the libraries and utilize its features, speed, and efficiency for which the Go ecology is justly famous.</p> <p>Offering a compendium of Go, the book begins with an account of how Go has been implemented. You'll also benefit from an in-depth account of concurrency and systems and network programming imperative for modern-day native cloud development through the course of the book.</p>

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Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Contributors
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Go and the Operating System
Go and the Operating System
The structure of the book
The history of Go
Why learn Go?
Go advantages
Compiling Go code
Executing Go code
Two Go rules
Downloading Go packages
Unix stdin, stdout, and stderr
About printing output
Using standard output
Getting user input
About := and =
About error output
Writing to log files
Error handling in Go
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
2
Understanding Go Internals
Understanding Go Internals
The Go compiler
Garbage Collection
Calling C code from Go
Calling Go functions from C code
The defer keyword
Panic and Recover
Two handy Unix utilities
Your Go environment
The Go Assembler
Node Trees
Learning more about go build
General Go coding advices
Additional Resources
Exercises
Summary
3
Working with Basic Go Data Types
Working with Basic Go Data Types
Go loops
Go arrays
Go slices
Go maps
Go constants
Go pointers
Dealing with times and dates
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
4
The Uses of Composite Types
The Uses of Composite Types
About composite types
Structures
Tuples
Regular expressions and pattern matching
Strings
The switch statement
Calculating Pi with great accuracy
Developing a key/value store in Go
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
5
Enhancing Go Code with Data Structures
Enhancing Go Code with Data Structures
About graphs and nodes
Algorithm complexity
Binary trees in Go
Hash tables in Go
Linked lists in Go
Doubly linked lists in Go
Queues in Go
Stacks in Go
The container package
Generating random numbers
Additional Resources
Exercises
Summary
6
What You Might Not Know About Go Packages
What You Might Not Know About Go Packages
About Go packages
About Go functions
Developing your own Go packages
Reading the Go code of a standard Go package
Creating good Go packages
The syscall package
Text and HTML templates
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
7
Reflection and Interfaces for All Seasons
Reflection and Interfaces for All Seasons
Type methods
Go interfaces
About type assertion
Developing your own interfaces
Reflection
Object-oriented programming in Go!
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
8
Telling a Unix System What to Do
Telling a Unix System What to Do
About Unix processes
The flag package
The io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces
The bufio package
Reading text files
Reading the amount of data you want from a file
Why are we using binary format?
Reading CSV files
Writing to a file
Loading and saving data on disk
The strings package revisited
About the bytes package
File permissions
Handling Unix signals
Programming Unix pipes in Go
Traversing directory trees
Using eBPF from Go
About syscall.PtraceRegs
Tracing system calls
User ID and group ID
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
9
Go Concurrency – Goroutines, Channels, and Pipelines
Go Concurrency – Goroutines, Channels, and Pipelines
About processes, threads, and goroutines
Goroutines
Waiting for your goroutines to finish
Channels
Pipelines
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
10
Go Concurrency – Advanced Topics
Go Concurrency – Advanced Topics
The Go scheduler revisited
The select keyword
Timing out a goroutine
Go channels revisited
Shared memory and shared variables
Catching race conditions
The context package
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
11
Code Testing, Optimization, and Profiling
Code Testing, Optimization, and Profiling
The Go version used in this chapter
Installing a beta or RC version of Go
About optimization
Optimizing Go code
Profiling Go code
The go tool trace utility
Testing Go code
Benchmarking Go code
A simple benchmarking example
Benchmarking buffered writing
Finding unreachable Go code
Cross-compilation
Creating example functions
Generating documentation
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
12
The Foundations of Network Programming in Go
The Foundations of Network Programming in Go
About net/http, net, and http.RoundTripper
About TCP/IP
About IPv4 and IPv6
The nc(1) command-line utility
Reading the configuration of network interfaces
Performing DNS lookups
Creating a web server in Go
HTTP tracing
Creating a web client in Go
Timing out HTTP connections
Wireshark and tshark tools
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
13
Network Programming – Building Servers and Clients
Network Programming – Building Servers and Clients
The net standard Go package
A TCP client
A TCP server
A UDP client
Developing a UDP server
A concurrent TCP server
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Doing low-level network programming
Where to go next?
Additional resources
Exercises
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Index
Index

Why are we using binary format?

In the previous section, the readSize.go utility illustrated how you can read a file byte by byte, which is a technique that best applies to binary files. So, you might ask why read data in binary format when text formats are so much easier to understand? The main reason is space reduction. Imagine that you want to store the number 20 as a string to a file. It is easy to understand that you will need two bytes for storing 20 using ASCII characters, one for storing 2 and another for storing 0. Storing 20 in binary format requires just one byte, since 20 can be represented as 00010100 in binary or as 0x14 in hexadecimal.

This difference might look insignificant when you are dealing with small amounts of data, but it could be pretty substantial when dealing with data found in applications such as database servers.

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