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

Creating and Writing to Files

The Go language provides support in various ways to create and write to new files. We will examine some of the most common ways in which this is performed.

The os package provides a simple way in which to create a file. For those who are familiar with the touch command from the Unix world, it is similar to this. Here is the signature of the function:

func Create(name string(*File, error)

The function will create an empty file just like the touch command. It is important to note that if it already exists, then it will truncate the file.

The Create function from the os package input parameter is the name of the file and the location that you want to create. If successful, it will return a File type. It is worth noting that the File type satisfies the io.Write and io.Read interfaces. This is important to know for later in the chapter:

package main
import (
  "fmt"
  "os"
)
func main() {
  f...