Go Succinctly

Who is this book for?

This book is for any developer familiar with a programming language such as Java or C# who is looking for a fast-paced but general introduction to Go.

While I cover a lot of ground in this short book, there are plenty of topics that I don’t have the space to delve into. The Go language itself is quite small and concise, but there’s a lot of depth to it, and the sheer volume of packages available in the Go Standard Library makes covering everything impossible.

My goal is to give you enough Go to inspire you to learn more. Take what I give you, enhance it, break it, work out how to fix it, and dive into the documentation and other resources available for truly immersing yourself in the language.

Go is gaining significant traction for a very good reason: it is an excellent language for solving modern-day development problems. I predict that Go will become increasingly popular over the next few years, and any investment you put into learning it now will be rewarded in the future.

Code examples

All code examples in this book can be found on Bitbucket.

Each sample can be identified by the code listing number given in this book. Furthermore, each code file has a link to the Go Playground sandbox environment so that you can run it on Google’s servers without installing Go on your own machine (if that’s what you want to do). The only exceptions are samples that require external resources because you cannot link to them from the Playground: the only communication that playground programs have with the outside world is via standard output.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the team at Syncfusion for inviting me to write this book, as well as the editors and reviewers that made it look and read better than I could have managed on my own. Any book project, even one as small as this, involves a significant time investment, and for me that meant locking myself away in my office when I could have been spending time with my lovely wife Amanda and our six wonderful children: Ben, Marie, Samuel, Malachy, Patrick, and Grace. I’d like to extend my thanks to them for all their support and understanding. Ben, in particular, gets an extra vote of thanks for helping me with proofreading.

So with all that out of the way, let’s talk about Go.