Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By : Alex Guerrieri
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By: Alex Guerrieri

Overview of this book

System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS. This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem. You'll then familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo-terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP. As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature - concurrency, which will help you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: An Introduction to System Programming and Go
5
Section 2: Advanced File I/O Operations
9
Section 3: Understanding Process Communication
14
Section 4: Deep Dive into Concurrency
19
Section 5: A Guide to Using Reflection and CGO

Web servers in Go

One of Go's biggest and most successful applications is the creation of web servers. In this section, we will see what a web server actually is, how the HTTP protocol works, and how to implement a web server application using both the standard library and third-party packages.

Web server

A web server application is software that can serve content using the HTTP protocol (and some other related ones) over a TCP/IP network. There are many well-known web server applications, such as Apache, NGINX, and Microsoft IIS. Common server use case scenarios include the following:

  • Serving static files, such websites and related resources: HTML pages, images, style sheets, and scripts.
  • Exposing a web application...