Preface

The Go programming language has firmly established itself as a favorite for building complex and scalable system applications. Go offers a direct and practical approach to programming that lets programmers write correct and predictable code using concurrency idioms and a full-featured standard library.

What this learning path covers

Module 1, Learning Go programming, is a step-by-step, practical guide full of real world examples to help you get started with Go in no time at all. We start off by understanding the fundamentals of Go, followed by a detailed description of the Go data types, program structures and Maps. After this, you learn how to use Go concurrency idioms to avoid pitfalls and create programs that are exact in expected behavior. Next, you will be familiarized with the tools and libraries that are available in Go for writing and exercising tests, benchmarking, and code coverage.

Finally, you will be able to utilize some of the most important features of GO such as, Network Programming and OS integration to build efficient applications. All the concepts are explained in a crisp and concise manner and by the end of this module; you would be able to create highly efficient programs that you can deploy over cloud.

Module 2, Go Design Patterns, will provide readers with a reference point to software design patterns and CSP concurrency design patterns to help them build applications in a more idiomatic, robust, and convenient way in Go.

The module starts with a brief introduction to Go programming essentials and quickly moves on to explain the idea behind the creation of design patterns and how they appeared in the 90's as a common "language" between developers to solve common tasks in object-oriented programming languages. You will then learn how to apply the 23 Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns in Go and also learn about CSP concurrency patterns, the "killer feature" in Go that has helped Google develop software to maintain thousands of servers.

With all of this the module will enable you to understand and apply design patterns in an idiomatic way that will produce concise, readable, and maintainable software.

Module 3, Go Programming Blueprints - Second Edition, will show you how to leverage all the latest features and much more. This module shows you how to build powerful systems and drops you into real-world situations. You will learn to develop high-quality command-line tools that utilize the powerful shell capabilities and perform well using Go's in-built concurrency mechanisms. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of our projects, and the lessons learned throughout this module will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. You will get a feel for app deployment using Docker and Google App Engine. Each project could form the basis of a start-up, which means they are directly applicable to modern software markets.

What you need for this learning path

Module 1:

To follow the examples in this module, you will need Go version 1.6 or later. Go supports architectures including AMD64, x386, and ARM running the following operating systems:

• Windows XP (or later)

• Mac OSX 10.7 (or later)

• Linux 2.6 (or later)

• FreeBSD 8 (or later)

Module 2:

Most of the chapters in this module are written following a simple TDD approach, here the requirements are written first, followed by some unit tests and finally the code that satisfies those requirements. We will use only tools that comes with the standard library of Go as a way to better understand the language and its possibilities. This idea is key to follow the module and understanding the way that Go solves problems, especially in distributed systems and concurrent applications.

Module 3:

To compile and run the code from this module, you will need a computer capable of running an operating system that supports the Go toolset, a list of which can be found at https://golang.org/doc/install#requirements

Appendix, Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment, has some useful tips to install Go and set up your development environment, including how to work with the GOPATH environment variable.

Who this learning path is for

Beginners to Go who are comfortable in other OOP languages like Java, C# or Python will find this course interesting and beneficial.

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Questions

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