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 (13 chapters)

Type declaration


In Go, it is possible to bind a type to an identifier to create a new named type that can be referenced and used wherever the type is needed. Declaring a type takes the general format as follows:

type <name identifier> <underlying type name>

The type declaration starts with the keyword type followed by a name identifier and the name of an existing underlying type. The underlying type can be a built-in named type such as one of the numeric types, a Boolean, or a string type as shown in the following snippet of type declarations:

type truth bool 
type quart float64 
type gallon float64 
type node string 

Note

A type declaration can also use a composite type literal as its underlying type. Composite types include array, slice, map, and struct. This section focuses on non-composite types. For further details on composite types, refer to Chapter 7, Composite Types.

The following sample illustrates how named types work in their most basic forms. The...