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

The unsafe Package

Go is a statically typed language, and it has its own runtime that does memory allocation and garbage collection. So, unlike C, all the work related to memory management is taken care of by the runtime. Unless you have some special requirements, you would never have to deal with memory directly in your code. When there is a requirement, though, the unsafe package in the standard library gives you features to let you peek into the memory of an object.

As the name suggests, it is normally not considered safe to use this package in your code. Another thing to note is that the unsafe package does not come with Go 1 compatibility guidelines, which means that functionalities could stop working in future versions of Go.

The simplest example you can find of using the unsafe package can be found in the math package:

func Float32bits(f float32) uint32
{
  return *(*uint32)(unsafe.Pointer(&f))
}

This takes a float32 as input and returns uint32. The...