Название: Go Faster: Join the thriving community of skilled Go developers!
Автор: Ollie Phillips
Издательство: Leanpub
Год: 2023-02-18
Страниц: 216
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), mobi, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Working with Go effectively requires proficiency and understanding beyond learning the simple syntax. It can take developers months or even years to acquire this experience, especially those coming from OOP. This book sets out to short-circuit that process and get you there faster! Includes Generics.

Go Faster is a book for those wanting to learn the Golang programming language. Though many great books have been published on this subject with the same aim, Go Faster takes a slightly different approach. For starters, it recognises that Go is a relatively simple language with just 25 keywords and that most developers do not struggle to learn its limited syntax.

It acknowledges that most readers will be able to set up a Golang development environment using one of the operating system-specific binaries, without needing detailed instruction. It recognises that most readers will have a basic level of programming knowledge already - possibly even prior experience with Go - but that that knowledge may differ, depending on their route into programming and the languages they have used.

Go, or Golang is a programming language developed by a team at Google. Similar to C (or Clang), it draws inspiration from many other programming languages also. Go is a high-performance language which runs directly against physical machine resources and not on a virtual machine, unlike Java for example. Further, asynchronous programming via concurrency and goroutines can fully utilise the multiple cores of modern CPUs better than many other multi-threaded languages.

Go is a compiled language. Your program code is built into an OS-specific executable and not interpreted at runtime. It is statically typed, so types are known - and fixed - at compile time. Memory management in Go is for the most part automatic. Memory allocation is done for us as required, and memory is deallocated when no longer in use via a garbage collection process. Together these traits help to eliminate many common programming errors. Go is opinionated on many things, one of which is formatting. This opinion, together with its simple syntax, results in very readable and clear code. Go has a complete suite of built-in tooling which includes utilities for testing, building, profiling and more. It is the readable code and powerful tooling which attract many developers to the language.

The examples in Go Faster are simple by design. There are no real-world or useful applications, instead, all the non-essential code is stripped away to help the user see the principles being demonstrated and grasp the concepts. Go Faster is designed to assist developers coming from object-oriented programming. It elaborates in areas which can confuse since the Go programming paradigm is different than that of OOP. And like Go itself, Go Faster is opinionated with its semantics.

The book also covers features which are relatively new to the language. Features that many developers, even experienced ones, may not yet be familiar with, and many existing texts may not yet explore, such as Generics and Workspaces. Finally, Go Faster reflects the author's own journey learning Go and is laid out accordingly. Not as an A-to-Z style reference, but in a way that should enable understanding earlier, laying solid building blocks on which the reader can progress.

If the author was learning Go again, this is the way they would structure their learning path, and hopefully, it is this structure which helps users at all levels gain a solid understanding of Go, quickly.