Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

By : Achilleas Anagnostopoulos
Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

By: Achilleas Anagnostopoulos

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, Go has become one of the favorite languages for building scalable and distributed systems. Its opinionated design and built-in concurrency features make it easy for engineers to author code that efficiently utilizes all available CPU cores. This Golang book distills industry best practices for writing lean Go code that is easy to test and maintain, and helps you to explore its practical implementation by creating a multi-tier application called Links ‘R’ Us from scratch. You’ll be guided through all the steps involved in designing, implementing, testing, deploying, and scaling an application. Starting with a monolithic architecture, you’ll iteratively transform the project into a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that supports the efficient out-of-core processing of large link graphs. You’ll learn about various cutting-edge and advanced software engineering techniques such as building extensible data processing pipelines, designing APIs using gRPC, and running distributed graph processing algorithms at scale. Finally, you’ll learn how to compile and package your Go services using Docker and automate their deployment to a Kubernetes cluster. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to think like a professional software developer or engineer and write lean and efficient Go code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Software Engineering and the Software Development Life Cycle
3
Section 2: Best Practices for Maintainable and Testable Go Code
7
Section 3: Designing and Building a Multi-Tier System from Scratch
14
Section 4: Scaling Out to Handle a Growing Number of Users
18
Epilogue

Best Practices for Writing Clean and Maintainable Go Code

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
- Martin Fowler [8]

Writing clean code that is easy to test and maintain is much harder than it seems at first glance. Fortunately, Go, as a programming language, is quite opinionated and comes with its own set of best practices.

If you take a look at some of the available material for learning Go (for example, Effective Go [6]) or watch some talks by prominent members of the core Go team such as Rob Pike, it becomes evident that software engineers are gently nudged toward applying those principles when working on their own Go projects. From my perspective and experience, these best practices tend to have a measurable positive effect on the code quality metrics associated with a code base and at the...