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

Simple Routing

The server built just now in the previous exercise does not do much. It just responds with a message and we cannot ask anything else. Before we can make our server more dynamic, let's imagine we want to create an online book and we want to be able to select a chapter just changing the URL. At the moment, if we browse the following pages:

http://localhost:8080
http://localhost:8080/hello
http://localhost:8080/chapter1

We always see the same message, but we now want to associate different messages with these different paths on our server. We will do this by introducing some simple routing to our server.

A path is what you see after the 8080 in the URL; it can be one number, a word, a set of numbers or character groups separated by a "/". In order to do this, we will use another function of the net/http package, which is:

HandleFunc(pattern string, handler func(ResponseWriter, *Request))

Here, the pattern is the path we want to be served by...