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

Preface

This book will provide good, in-depth explanations of various interesting Go concepts. It begins with Unix and system programming, which will help you understand what components the Unix operating system has to offer, from the kernel API to the filesystem, and allow you to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of system programming.

Next, it moves on to cover the application of I/O operations, focusing on the filesystem, files, and streams in the Unix operating system. It covers many topics, including reading from and writing to files, among other I/O operations.

This book also shows how various processes communicate with one another. It explains how to use Unix pipe-based communication in Go, how to handle signals inside an application, and how to use a network to communicate effectively. Also, it shows how to encode data to improve communication speed.

The book will, toward the end, help you to understand the most modern feature of Go—concurrency. It will introduce you to the tools the language has, along with sync and channels, and how and when to use each one.