Go Fundamentals

Start Writing Production-Ready Go Code Fast

Thousands of developers and teams want to start taking advantage of Go, the powerful language used in projects ranging from Kubernetes to Docker and Vault. Go Fundamentals is specifically designed to get you up-to-speed fast, to leverage your existing knowledge of other languages, and to help you avoid common mistakes made by Go newcomers.

Based on author Mark Bates’s and Cory LaNou’s pioneering Gopher Guides training curricula, this book will allow you to quickly understand and use Go syntax, core features, and idioms. Reflecting Go through version 1.18–which includes Go’s exciting new support for generics–this book prepares you to write robust, reliable, well-performing production code right from the outset.Mark Bates

Cory LaNou

• Learn how Go manages packages, modules, and dependencies
• Apply Go basics, such as variable declaration, types, and control flow
• Work effectively with collection types, iteration, functions, structs, and pointers
• Understand Go Slices and use them properly
• Write idiomatic Go, using principles such as embedding and composition
• Expertly use concurrency to improve code performance
• Create proper tests to quickly identify and fix problems
• Write simpler, better code with generics and interfaces
• Take advantage of channels, context, sync primatives, and other advanced features

Go is lightweight, simple, and perfect for modern cloud-native and microservices development, which is why Go developers are in such high demand. With this guide and six months’ experience with any modern programming language, you’ll have what you need to leap into Go programming.

Table of Contents

1 Modules, Packages, and Dependencies

2 Go Language Basics

3 Arrays, Slices, and Iteration

4 Maps and Control Structures

5 Functions

6 Structs, Methods, and Pointers

7 Testing

8 Interfaces

9 Errors

10 Generics

11 Channels

12 Context

13 Synchronization

14 Working with Files

From the Author

“This book is the guide for programmers to become gophers. Leaning on Mark and Cory’s years of experience in the field and in the Go community it takes a very grassroots approach to learning. It also leverages their practical experience writing Go libraries and applications to present to the reader pragmatic solutions and simple explanations.”

— Excerpt from the Foreward by Steve Francia (@spdf13)

About the Author

Mark Bates is cofounder and instructor at Gopher Guides, the industry leader for Go training, consulting, and conference workshops. After graduating with a degree in music from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 1999, Mark joined the original dot-com boom as a software engineer and began his career as a technologist. Since then, Mark has been fortunate enough to work with some of the world’s largest and most innovative companies, including Apple, Uber, and Visa.

When he first discovered Go in the summer of 2013, Mark was immediately drawn to the language and its ecosystem. In 2014, Mark attended the first GopherCon, where he met Cory LaNou. For seven years, Mark hosted the GopherCon lightning talks and has been proud to introduce hundreds of new speakers to the community. Mark has spoken at conferences around the world and is a regular on the Go Time podcast.

When not coding or writing about coding, Mark enjoys spending time with his family, traveling, and recording music. Mark is currently completing a master’s degree in music production from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

Cory LaNou, Gopher Guides cofounder and instructor, is a full stack technologist who has specialized in start-ups for the last 20 years. Cory has deep ties to the Go community, having started one of the very first Go meetups in the world, Denver Gophers. Using his real world experience from working on projects such as InfluxDB, a highly scalable database written in Go, he has published numerous practical Go training courses and articles.