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

Accepting Interfaces and Returning Structs

There is a Go proverb that states "Accept interfaces, return structs." It can be restated as accept interfaces and return concrete types. This proverb is talking about accepting interfaces for your APIs (functions, methods, and so on) and the return to be structs or concrete types. This proverb follows Postel's Law, which states "Be conservative with what you do, be liberal with what you accept." We are focusing on the "be liberal with what you accept." By accepting interfaces, you are increasing the flexibility of the API for your function or method. By doing this, you are allowing for the user of the API to meet the requirements of the interface, but not forcing the user to use a concrete type. If our functions or methods only accept concrete types, then we are limiting the users of our functions to a specific implementation. In this chapter, we are going to explore the previously mentioned Go proverb and...