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

Templating

Although JSON can be the best choice when complex data structures have to be shared across software programs, this is not the case, in general, when the HTTP server is supposed to be consumed by humans. In the previous exercises and activities, the chosen way to format a text has been the fmt.Sprintf function, which is good for formatting texts, but is simply insufficient when a more dynamic and complex text is required. As you will have noticed in the previous exercise, the message returned in case a name was passed as a parameter to the URL observed a specific pattern, and this is where a new concept comes in – the template. A template is a skeleton from which complex entities can be developed. Essentially, a template is like a text with some blanks, and a template engine will take some values and fill the blanks, as you can see in the following diagram:

Figure 15.19: Templating example

As you can see, {{name}} is a placeholder and, when...