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)

Strings

Strictly speaking, a string in Go is not a composite type, but there are so many Go functions that support strings that I decided to describe strings in more detail in this chapter.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Working with Basic Go Data Types, strings in Go are value types, not pointers as is the case with C strings. Additionally, Go supports UTF-8 strings by default, which means that you do not need to load any special packages or do anything tricky in order to print Unicode characters. However, there are subtle differences between a character, a rune, and a byte, as well as differences between a string and a string literal, which are going to be clarified here.

A Go string is a read-only byte slice that can hold any type of bytes and can have an arbitrary length.

You can define a new string literal as follows:

const sLiteral = "\x99\x42\x32\x55\x50\x35\x23\x50\x29...