Book Image

Mastering Go - Second Edition

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
Book Image

Mastering Go - Second Edition

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Often referred to (incorrectly) as Golang, Go is the high-performance systems language of the future. Mastering Go, Second Edition helps you become a productive expert Go programmer, building and improving on the groundbreaking first edition. Mastering Go, Second Edition shows how to put Go to work on real production systems. For programmers who already know the Go language basics, this book provides examples, patterns, and clear explanations to help you deeply understand Go’s capabilities and apply them in your programming work. The book covers the nuances of Go, with in-depth guides on types and structures, packages, concurrency, network programming, compiler design, optimization, and more. Each chapter ends with exercises and resources to fully embed your new knowledge. This second edition includes a completely new chapter on machine learning in Go, guiding you from the foundation statistics techniques through simple regression and clustering to classification, neural networks, and anomaly detection. Other chapters are expanded to cover using Go with Docker and Kubernetes, Git, WebAssembly, JSON, and more. If you take the Go programming language seriously, the second edition of this book is an essential guide on expert techniques.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Go channels revisited

Once the select keyword comes into play, Go channels can be used in several unique ways to do many more things than those you experienced in Chapter 9, Concurrency in Go – Goroutines, Channels, and Pipelines. This section will reveal the many uses of Go channels.

It helps to remember that the zero value of the channel type is nil, and that if you send a message to a closed channel, the program will panic. However, if you try to read from a closed channel, you will get the zero value of the type of that channel. So, after closing a channel, you can no longer write to it, but you can still read from it.

In order to be able to close a channel, the channel must not be receive-only. Additionally, a nil channel always blocks, which means that trying to read or write from a nil channel will block. This property of channels can be very useful when you want...