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)

The advantages of binary formats

In the previous section, the readSize.go utility illustrated how you can read a file byte by byte, which is a technique that best applies to binary files. So, you might ask, why read data in binary format when text formats are so much easier to understand? The main reason is space reduction. Imagine that you want to store the number 20 as a string to a file. It is easy to understand that you will need two bytes to store 20 using ASCII characters: one for storing 2 and another for storing 0.

Storing 20 in binary format requires just one byte, since 20 can be represented as 00010100 in binary or as 0x14 in hexadecimal.

This difference might look insignificant when you are dealing with small amounts of data, but it could be pretty substantial when dealing with data found in applications such as database servers.

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