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

Summary

The more operating systems your application supports, the more complicated it will get. Hopefully armed with the knowledge of some supportive packages for developing independently of the platform, you’ll feel confident that your application will run similarly across different operating systems. Also, by checking the runtime operating system and even separating code into separate operating system-specific files with build tags, you have at least a couple of options for defining how to organize your code. This chapter goes more in-depth than may be necessary, but hopefully, it inspires you.

Building for multiple operating systems will expand the usage of your command-line application. Not only can you reach Linux or Unix users but also Darwin and Windows users as well. If you want to grow your user base, then building an application to support more operating systems is an easy way to do so.

In the next chapter, Chapter 8, Building for Humans Versus Machines, we&...