The Go Programming Language

The authoritative resource to writing clear and idiomatic Go to solve real-world problems

Google’s Go team member Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language, provide hundreds of interesting and practical examples of well-written Go code to help programmers learn this flexible, and fast, language. It is designed to get you started programming with Go right away and then to progress on to more advanced topics.

• Basic components : an opening tutorial provides information and examples to get you off the ground and doing useful things as quickly as possible. This includes:
  • command-line arguments
  • gifs
  • URLs
  • web servers
• Program structure : simple examples cover the basic structural elements of a Go program without getting sidetracked by complicated algorithms or data structures.
• Data types: Go offers a variety of ways to organize data, with a spectrum of data types that at one end match the features of the hardware and at the other end provide what programmers need to conveniently represent complicated data structures.
• Composite types :
  • arrays
  • slices
  • maps
  • structs
  • JSON
  • test and HTML templates
• Functions : break a big job into smaller pieces that might well be written by different people separated by both time and space.
• Methods :
  • declarations
  • with a pointer receiver
  • struct embedding
  • values and expressions
• Interfaces : write functions that are more flexible and adaptable because they are not tied to the details of one particular implementation.
• Concurrent programming : Goroutines, channels, and with shared variables.
• Packages : use existing packages and create new ones.
• Automated testing : write small programs that check the code.
• Reflection features : update variables and inspect their values at run time.
• Low-level programming : step outside the usual rules to achieve the highest possible performance, interoperate with libraries written in other languages, or implement a function that cannot be expressed in pure Go.

Each chapter has exercises to test your understanding and explore extensions and alternatives. Source code is freely available for download and may be conveniently fetched, built, and installed using the go get command.

Alan A. A. Donovan is a member of Google’s Go team in New York. He holds computer science degrees from Cambridge and MIT and has been programming in industry since 1996. Since 2005, he has worked at Google on infrastructure projects and was the co-designer of its proprietary build system, Blaze. He has built many libraries and tools for static analysis of Go programs, including oracle, godoc -analysis, eg, and gorename.

Brian W. Kernighan is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He was a member of technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs from 1969 until 2000, where he worked on languages and tools for Unix. He is the co-author of several books, including The C Programming Language, Second Edition (Prentice Hall, 1988), and The Practice of Programming (Addison-Wesley, 1999).