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 about creating functions. We also discovered that functions can be passed as parameters and returned from a function. In this chapter, we will work with errors and learn how to return those from functions.

Developers are not perfect and, by extension, neither is the code that they produce. All software at some point in time has had errors. Handling errors is critical when you are developing software. These errors can have a negative impact of varying degrees on its users. The impact on the users of your software can be more far-reaching than you realize.

For instance, let's consider the Northeast Blackout of 2003. On August 14, there was a blackout for about 50 million people in the United States and Canada that lasted for 14 days. This was due to a race condition bug in the alarm system in a control room. Technically, a race condition bug is when two separate threads try to access the same memory location for a write operation...