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 (20 chapters)
Title Page

Go slices

Go slices are very powerful and it would not be an exaggeration to say that slices could totally replace the use of arrays in Go. There are only a few occasions when you will need to use an array instead of a slice. The most obvious one is when you are absolutely sure that you will need to store a fixed number of elements.

Slices are implemented using arrays internally, which means that Go uses an underlying array for each slice.

As slices are passed by reference to functions, which means that what is actually passed is the memory address of the slice variable, any modifications you make to a slice inside a function will not get lost after the function exits. Additionally, passing a big slice to a function is significantly faster than passing an array with the same number of elements because Go will not have to make a copy of the slice; it will just pass the memory...