Book Image

The Go Workshop

By : Delio D'Anna, Andrew Hayes, Sam Hennessy, Jeremy Leasor, Gobin Sougrakpam, Dániel Szabó
Book Image

The Go Workshop

By: Delio D'Anna, Andrew Hayes, Sam Hennessy, Jeremy Leasor, Gobin Sougrakpam, Dániel Szabó

Overview of this book

The Go Workshop will take the pain out of learning the Go programming language (also known as Golang). It is designed to teach you to be productive in building real-world software. Presented in an engaging, hands-on way, this book focuses on the features of Go that are used by professionals in their everyday work. Each concept is broken down, clearly explained, and followed up with activities to test your knowledge and build your practical skills. Your first steps will involve mastering Go syntax, working with variables and operators, and using core and complex types to hold data. Moving ahead, you will build your understanding of programming logic and implement Go algorithms to construct useful functions. As you progress, you'll discover how to handle errors, debug code to troubleshoot your applications, and implement polymorphism using interfaces. The later chapters will then teach you how to manage files, connect to a database, work with HTTP servers and REST APIs, and make use of concurrent programming. Throughout this Workshop, you'll work on a series of mini projects, including a shopping cart, a loan calculator, a working hours tracker, a web page counter, a code checker, and a user authentication system. By the end of this book, you'll have the knowledge and confidence to tackle your own ambitious projects with Go.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
1. Variables and Operators
2
2. Logic and Loops

Formatting Time

So far in this chapter, you may have noticed that the dates are pretty ugly. I mean, take a look at the following lines:

The transaction has started at:  2019-09-27 13:50:58.2715452 +0200 CEST   m=+0.002992801

These were intentionally left there to force you to think about whether this is all that Go can do. Is there a way to format down these lines to make them more convenient and easier to read? If so, what are those extra lines?

Here, we will answer those questions. When we talk about time formatting, there are two main concepts we are referring to. The first option is for instances when we would like our time variable to output a desired looking string when we use it in print, and the second option is for when we would like to take a string and parse it to a specific format. Both have their own use cases; we are going to look at them in more detail as I teach you how to use both.

First, we are going to learn about the Parse() function. This function...