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

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we learned how to use if, if-else, switch, continue, and break in Go.

Go is a strongly typed language, and all data is assigned a type. That type is fixed and can't be changed. What you can and can't do with your data is constrained by the types you assign. Understanding exactly what defines every one of Go's core types is critical to success with the Go language.

In later chapters, we'll talk about Go's more complex types, but those types are built on the core types defined in this chapter.

Go's core types are well-thought-out and easy to understand once you understand the details. Having to understand the details means Go's type system is not always intuitive. For example, Go's most common number type, int, may be either 32 bits or 64 bits in size depending on the computer used to compile the code.

Types are needed to make data easier for humans to work with. Computers only think about data...