Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By : Marian Montagnino
Book Image

Building Modern CLI Applications in Go

By: Marian Montagnino

Overview of this book

Although graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are intuitive and user-friendly, nothing beats a command-line interface (CLI) when it comes to productivity. Many organizations settle for a GUI without searching for alternatives that offer better accessibility and functionality. If this describes your organization, then pick up this book and get them to rethink that decision. Building Modern CLI Applications in Go will help you achieve an interface that rivals a GUI in elegance yet surpasses it in high-performance execution. Through its practical, step-by-step approach, you’ll learn everything you need to harness the power and simplicity of the Go language to build CLI applications that revolutionize the way you work. After a primer on CLI standards and Go, you’ll be launched into tool design and proper framework use for true development proficiency. The book then moves on to all things CLI, helping you master everything from arguments and flags to errors and API calls. Later, you’ll dive into the nuances of empathic development so that you can ensure the best UX possible, before you finish up with build tags, cross-compilation, and container-based distribution. By the end of this UX book, you’ll be fully equipped to take the performance and flexibility of your organization’s applications to the next level.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with a Solid Foundation
6
Part 2: The Ins and Outs of a CLI
10
Part 3: Interactivity and Empathic Driven Design
14
Part 4: Building and Distributing for Different Platforms

Commonly used program layouts for robust applications

Along your programming journey, you may come across many different structures for applications. There is no standard programming layout for Go. Given all this freedom, however, the choice of the structure must be carefully made because it will dictate whether we understand and know how to maintain our application. The proper structure for the application will ideally also be simple, easy to test, and directly reflect the business design and how the code works.

When choosing a structure for your Go application, use your best judgment. Do not choose arbitrarily. Listen to the advice in context and learn to justify your choices. There’s no reason to choose a structure early, as your code will evolve over time and some structures work better for small applications while others are better for medium to large applications.

Program layouts

Let’s dig into some common and emerging structural patterns that have been...