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

Flags and Arguments

Go provides support for creating command-line interface tools. Many times, when we are writing Go programs that are executables, they need to accept various inputs. These inputs could include the location of a file, a value to run the program in the debug state, getting help to run the program, and more. All of this is made possible by a package in the Go standard library called flag. It is used to allow the passing of arguments to the program. A flag is an argument that is passed to a Go program. The order of the flags being passed to the Go program using the flag package does not matter to Go.

To define your flag, you must know the flag type you will be accepting. The flag package provides many functions for defining flags. Here is a sample list:

func Bool(name string, value bool, usage string) *bool
func Duration(name string, value time.Duration, usage string) *time.Duration
func Float64(name string, value float64, usage string) *float64
func Int(name string...