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

Goroutines

Imagine several people have some nails to hammer into a wall. Each person has a different number of nails and a different area of the wall, but there is only one hammer. Each person uses the hammer for one nail, then passes the hammer to the next person, and so on. The person with the fewest nails will finish earlier but they will all share the same hammer; this is how Goroutines work.

Using Goroutines, Go allows multiple tasks to run at the same time (they are also called coroutines). These are routines (read tasks) that can co-run inside the same process but are totally concurrent. Goroutines do not share memory, which is why they are different from threads. However, we will see how easy it is to pass variables across them in your code, and how this might lead to some unexpected behavior.

Writing a Goroutine is nothing special; they are just normal functions. Actually, each function can easily become a Goroutine; all we have to do is to write the word go before calling...