Learn Golang in 1 Month

30 June 2016

At my new job we have a Go backend. It’s a nice language with familiar syntax. Someone with C, C++, C# or Java experience will feel right at home. A language designed to make Software Engineering easier. At the same time it’s being sought out to address bottlenecks in Ruby, Perl, Node.js and Python codebases.

We chose Go because it seemed like a useful tool to understand for building large software systems. The Scripting languages are among the slowest, Go is compiled into a binary so no runtime is spent interpreting. A binary also makes the deployment process painless as you can just scp the file around. Go is a modern language with first-class concurrency primitives. It’s been designed to leverage modern hardware with multiple cores.

Go is a language designed in the service of software engineering. Other programming languages come from academia Haskell, OCAML, ML, etc. Go on the otherhand was designed to solve problems faced at Google. One such problem is software management. Meaning, how do we deal with codebases which are millions of lines long? How do we deal with version skew over time? Go is designed to be a very concise language. It’s spec is among the smallest of any language. Such conciseness allows for the creation of code reading tools. Tools like gofmt, gofix and godoc. The language also lacks class-inheritance favoring the gang-of-four’s Composition over Inheritance pattern.

Source: Program your next server in Go

Syntax

• Learn X in Y Minutes - Go
• Go Playground
• Go Playground Chrome Extension
• Four days of Go An experienced developer’s impression of the language.

Getting Started

• Do How to write Go code to get some basic environment issues out of the way and learn how to call go functions from different files and packages. Doing this first would have saved me some headaches.
• Go Tour The defacto tutorial for Go.
• Go By Example Learn Go by following examples
• The little Go Book A good self contained resource

Community

• IRC Freenode #go-nuts chat channel. They get pretty pedantic at times and frequently refer you to the Spec.
• Gophers Slack has regional chatrooms as well as topic specific ones.

Exercises

• Stdlib SQL tutorial If you’ll be using a database.
• Concurrency Exercises for the confused newbie gopher

Read the Official Blog

The Go team has developed a very good blog. All the articles are very good and essential actually for many useful go tools like go test and go doc. Useful for staying up to date on language news.

• The Cover story Test Coverage tool.
• Go slices usage and internals How Slices (Arrays) work in Go.
• Constants in Go
• Go concurrency patterns: Pipelines
• Strings
• Go wiki learn page
• Introducing gofix

Web applications

• Writing Web applications build a web app with just the standard library
• Go-json-rest boilerplate json api
• Apex a futuristic serverless deploy strategy for Amazon Web Services

JSON

• JSON and Go
• Go and JSON This resource actually demos using field tags to unmarshal JSON with odd key names like _foo super useful
• Playground: unmarshal json

Godoc

Use Godoc to document your programs, it’s very good and everyone uses it. We use it at Capsule to generate our internal API documentation.

• Work through Documenting Go Code
• godoc Godoc Read the doc on the tool for usage.
  • Run godoc -http=:6060 -goroot=. assuming you’re in a project’s directory. godoc docs are designed to give you a snapshot of all go code on your machine. Once you have this running you can see the docs by navigating to http://localhost:6060/

Object-Oriented

The way Object-Orientation is achieved in Go differs a bit from languages like Java or C#. The main facility is via interfaces. This approach helps avoid long class hierarchies.

• Object Oriented Go
• Wikipedia: Composition over Inheritance

Go playground

Here are some code samples I’ve written over the past couple of months. Every time I learned something or made a new insight into Go as a noob I ended up making a playground demo and tweeting it. Hopefully some of them are useful to someone else.

• basic if else
• Initialize a nested map
• Sort slice of pointers to struct
• Newton’s method for finding square roots
• Slices Solution solution to Tour exercise: Slices
• Pro solution to image problem
• Golang Closures
• Consts and custom types printf("%T", var) prints the type of a variable
• Structs must be declared before their use
• But placing the struct outside a function makes it available
• interface inside a struct and run it
• struct initialization must have a trailing curly on the same line as the last field :/
• type assertions
• make a green square
• unmarshal nested JSON
• how to find age from birthday
• print day of week
• function arguments
• nil pointers
• cast integer to float and divide
• struct embedded and initialization
• round a floating point number to the nearest integer

Videos

• Golang testing sydjs 2014
• Web apps in go “Code that grows with grace”
• Go: a simple programming environment goes over some small go programs and interesting parts of the standard library I would transcribe the larger example he goes over towards the end. It’s a router that reads in a config file. It also demonstrates how to test such a server. Source code.
• Advanced Testing

Advanced

• Go Code Examples medium sized Go sample go programs
• type checking
• contrast Go linking with C linking
• LLVM in Go
• Styleguide beyond goimports
• 6 years of Go, best practices
• How to use the flag stdlib package to give your software arguments

Theory

• Wikipedia: Guarded Command Language
• Wikipedia: Communicating Sequential Processes
• Go channel axioms
• Go Garbage Collector A paper describing the upcoming garbage collector design

Why Go is the way it is

Some literature from one of the author’s of Go, Rob Pike, on Go’s design.

• Less is Exponentially more
• Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

If you need help solving your business problems with software read how to hire me.

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