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

Handler versus Handler Function

As you may have noticed, we used two different functions before, http.Handle and http.HandleFunc , both of which have a path as their first parameter, but which differ in terms of the second parameter. These two functions both ensure that a specific path is handled by a function. http.Handle, however, expects http.Handler to handle the path, while http.HandleFunc expects a function to do the same.

As we've seen before, http.Handler is any struct having a method with this signature:

ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request)

So, in both cases, there will always be a function with http.ResponseWriter and *http.Request as parameters that will handle the path. As to when one or the other might be chosen may just be a matter of personal preference in many cases, but it might be important, when creating a complex project, for example, to choose the right method. Doing so will ensure that the structure of the project is optimal. Different...