Learning Go

Go has rapidly become the preferred language for building web services. Plenty of tutorials are available to teach Go’s syntax to developers with experience in other programming languages, but tutorials aren’t enough. They don’t teach Go’s idioms, so developers end up recreating patterns that don’t make sense in a Go context. This practical guide provides the essential background you need to write clear and idiomatic Go.

No matter your level of experience, you’ll learn how to think like a Go developer. Author Jon Bodner introduces the design patterns experienced Go developers have adopted and explores the rationale for using them. This updated edition also shows you how Go’s generics support fits into the language.

This book helps you:

• Write idiomatic code in Go and design a Go project
• Understand the reasons behind Go’s design decisions
• Set up a Go development environment for a solo developer or team
• Learn how and when to use reflection, unsafe, and cgo
• Discover how Go’s features allow the language to run efficiently
• Know which Go features you should use sparingly or not at all
• Use Go’s tools to improve performance, optimize memory usage, and reduce garbage collection
• Learn how to use Go’s advanced development tools

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Setting Up Your Go Environment

Chapter 2. Predeclared Types and Declarations

Chapter 3. Composite Types

Chapter 4. Blocks, Shadows, and Control Structures

Chapter 5. Functions

Chapter 6. Pointers

Chapter 7. Types, Methods, and Interfaces

Chapter 8. Generics

Chapter 9. Errors

Chapter 10. Modules, Packages, and Imports

Chapter 11. Go Tooling

Chapter 12. Concurrency in Go

Chapter 13. The Standard Library

Chapter 14. The Context

Chapter 15. Writing Tests

Chapter 16. Here Be Dragons: Reflect, Unsafe, and Cgo

About the Author

Jon Bodner has been a software engineer, lead developer and architect for over 20 years. In that time, he has worked on software across many fields, including education, finance, commerce, healthcare, law, government, and internet infrastructure.

Currently, he is a Staff Engineer at Datadog, leading the effort to simplify onboarding for their APM product. Previously, Jon was a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, working on tech commercialization, open source, testing, the semantic engine that provides payment page detection and population for Capital One’s Eno browser extension (www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers), and improving support for virtual credit card numbers inside of Capital One.