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

Reflection

Reflection is the mechanism of inspecting code at runtime. Reflection is useful when you do not know or cannot guarantee the type of input for a function. In cases such as this, reflection can be used to inspect the type of the object and manipulate values of objects.

The Go reflect package gives you features to inspect and manipulate an object at runtime. It can be used not only for basic types such as int and string, but for inspecting slices, arrays, and structs as well.

Let's create a simple print() function to demonstrate how we can use reflection. We define a utility print function called MyPrint() that can print different types of objects. This is done by having an interface as an input to the function. Then, inside the function, we make use of the reflect package to alter the behavior according to the type of the input. Consider the following code:

package main
import (
  "fmt"
  "reflect"
)
type Animal struct...