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

Defining the Command-Line Process

At the core of a command-line application is its ability to process user input and return a result that either a user can easily comprehend or that another process can read as standard input. In Chapter 1, Understanding CLI Standards, we discussed the anatomy of a command-line application, but this chapter will go into detail on each aspect of its anatomy, breaking down the different types of input: subcommands, arguments, and flags. Additionally, other inputs will be discussed: stdin, signals, and control characters.

Just as there are many types of input that a command-line application can receive, there are many types of methods for processing data. This chapter won’t leave you hanging – examples of processing for each input type will follow.

Finally, it’s just as important to understand how to return the result, either data if successful or an error on failure, in a way that both humans and computers can easily interpret...