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

Type methods

A Go type method is a function with a special receiver argument. You declare methods as ordinary functions with an additional parameter that appears in front of the function name. This particular parameter connects the function to the type of that extra parameter. As a result, that parameter is called the receiver of the method.

The following Go code is the implementation of the Close() function as found in https://golang.org/src/os/file_plan9.go:

func (f *File) Close() error { 
    if err := f.checkValid("close"); err != nil { 
        return err 
    } 
    return f.file.close() 
} 

The Close() function is a type method because there is that (f *File) parameter in front of its name and after the func keyword. The f parameter is called the receiver of the method. In object-oriented programming terminology this process can be described as sending a message...