What this book covers

Chapter 1, A Quick Introduction to Go, begins by discussing the history of Go, important characteristics of Go, and the advantages of Go, before describing the godoc and go doc utilities and explaining how we can compile and execute Go programs. Then, the chapter discusses about controlling program flow, printing output and getting user input, working with command line arguments, and using log files. In the last part of Chapter 1, we develop a basic version of a statistics application that we are going to keep improving in forthcoming chapters.

Chapter 2, Basic Go Data Types, discusses the basic data types of Go, both numeric and non-numeric; arrays and slices that allow you to group data of the same date; Go pointers; constants; and working with dates and times. The last part of the chapter is about generating random numbers and populating the statistics application with random data.

Chapter 3, Composite Data Types, begins by teaching you about maps, before going into structures and the struct keyword. Additionally, it talks about regular expressions, pattern matching, and working with CSV files. Last, it improves the statistics application by adding data persistency to it.

Chapter 4, Go Generics, is about Generics and how to use the new syntax to write generic functions and define generic data types. This chapter also presents the cmp package, the slices package, and the maps package, which are all implemented using generics to work with as many data types as possible.

Chapter 5, Reflection and Interfaces, is about reflection, interfaces, and type methods, which are functions attached to data types. The chapter also covers the use of the sort.Interface interface for sorting slices, the use of the empty interface, type assertions, type switches, and the error data type. Additionally, we discuss how Go can mimic some object-oriented concepts before improving the statistics application. This chapter also compares generics with interfaces and reflection.

Chapter 6, Go Packages and Functions, is all about packages, modules, and functions, which are the main elements of packages. Among other things, we create a Go package for interacting with a SQLite3 database, create documentation for it, and explain the use of the sometimes-tricky defer keyword. Last, we talk about Workspaces, which is a relatively new Go feature.

Chapter 7, Telling a UNIX System What to Do, is about Systems Programming, which includes subjects such as working with command line arguments, handling UNIX signals, file input and output, the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces, and the use of the viper and cobra packages. Last, we update the statistics application to use JSON data and convert it into a proper command line utility with the help of the cobra package.

Chapter 8, Go Concurrency, discusses goroutines, channels, and pipelines. We learn about the differences between processes, threads, and goroutines, the sync package, and the way the Go scheduler operates. Additionally, we explore the use of the select keyword and we discuss the various types of Go channels as well as shared memory, mutexes, the sync.Mutex type, and the sync.RWMutex type. The rest of the chapter talks about the context package, the semaphore package, worker pools, how to time out goroutines, and how to detect race conditions.

Chapter 9, Building Web Services, discusses the net/http package, the development of web servers and web services, the creation of web clients, and the timing out of HTTP connections. We also convert the statistics application into a web service and create a command line client for it.

Chapter 10, Working with TCP/IP and WebSocket, is about the net package, TCP/IP, the TCP and UDP protocols, as well as the WebSocket protocol and working with RabbitMQ. We develop lots of practical servers and clients in this chapter.

Chapter 11, Working with REST APIs, is all about working with REST APIs and RESTful services. We learn how to define REST APIs and develop powerful concurrent RESTful servers as well as command line utilities that act as clients to RESTful services.

Chapter 12, Code Testing and Profiling, discusses code testing, code optimization, and code profiling, as well as cross compilation, creating example functions, the use of go:generate, and finding unreachable Go code.

Chapter 13, Fuzz Testing and Observability, talks about fuzz testing, which is a relatively new addition to the Go programming language, and about observability, which refers to the ability to understand, measure, and analyze the internal state and behavior of a system based on its external outputs or observable signals.

Chapter 14, Efficiency and Performance, is about benchmarking Go code, understanding the Go memory model, and eliminating memory leaks. The chapter also includes the development of an eBPF utility—eBPF has become a foundational technology for improving observability, security, and performance in modern Linux systems.

Chapter 15, Changes in Recent Go Versions, is about the language changes, additions, and improvements in the latest Go versions and it will help you understand how Go is evolving over time.

Appendix, The Go Garbage Collector, talks about the operation of the Go Garbage Collector and illustrates how this Go component can affect the performance of your code.