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

Channels

We've seen how to create concurrent code via Goroutines, how to synchronize it with WaitGroup, how to perform atomic operations, and how to temporarily stop the concurrency in order to synchronize access to shared variables. We will now introduce a different concept, the channel, which is typical of Go. A channel is what the name essentially suggests – it's something where messages can be piped, and any routine can send or receive messages through a channel. Similar to a slice, a channel is created the following way:

var ch chan int
ch = make(chan int)

Of course, it is possible to instantiate the channel directly with the following:

ch := make(chan int)

Just like with slices, we can also do the following:

ch := make(chan int, 10)

Here, a channel is created with a buffer of 10 items.

A channel can be of any type, such as integer, Boolean, float, and any struct that can be defined, and even slices and pointers, though the last two are generally...