Book Image

The Go Workshop

By : Delio D'Anna, Andrew Hayes, Sam Hennessy, Jeremy Leasor, Gobin Sougrakpam, Dániel Szabó
5 (2)
Book Image

The Go Workshop

5 (2)
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

GOB: Go's Own Encoding

Go has its own special data encoding protocol called gob. You can only use gob when the encoding and decoding are happening in Go. Being limited to Go is only a deal-breaker if you need to communicate with software written in other languages. It's common with software written to be used internally in an organization for both the encoding and decoding software to be written in the same language. As such, it's not a problem in most cases.

If you can use it, gob gives you exceptionally high performance and efficiency. For example, JSON is a string-based protocol that needs to be useable in any programming language. This limits what's possible with JSON and protocols like it. Gob, on the other hand, is a binary-based protocol, and gob only needs to work for Go users. This frees gob to become a space- and processing-efficient encoding protocol while still being easy to use.

Gob doesn't require any configuration or setup to use. Also...