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

Building an Audio Metadata CLI

Hands-on learning is one of the best ways to learn. So, in this chapter, we will build out a few of our example audio metadata CLI use cases from start to finish. The code is available online and can be explored alongside this chapter or independently. Forking the GitHub repo and playing around with the code, adding in new use cases and tests, are encouraged as these are excellent ways to learn before diving into some of the ways to refine your CLI in the following chapters.

Although this example covered in this chapter is not built on an empty code base – it is built on top of an existing REST API – it’s worth noting that the implementation of commands does not necessarily rely on an API. This is only an example and it’s encouraged that you use your imagination in this chapter on how commands could be implemented if not relying on an API. This chapter will give you an experimental code base and you’ll learn about...