Diving into Go: A Five-Week Intro

One of my favorite parts of being a developer here at Viget is our developer book club. We’ve read some fantastic books, but for our most recent go-round, we decided to try something different. A few of us have been interested in the Go programming language for some time, so we decided to combine two free online texts, An Introduction to Programming in Go and Go By Example, plus a few other resources, into a short introduction to the language. Chris and Ryan put together a curriculum that I thought was too good not to share with the internet at large.

Week 1

Chapter 1: Getting Started

• Files and Folders
• The Terminal
• Text Editors
• Go Tools
• Go By Example
  • Hello World

Chapter 2: Your First Program

• How to Read a Go Program

Chapter 3: Types

• Numbers
• Strings
• Booleans
• Go By Example
  • Values
  • Random Numbers
  • String Functions
  • String Formatting
  • Regular Expressions

Chapter 4: Variables

• How to Name a Variable
• Scope
• Constants
• Defining Multiple Variables
• An Example Program
• Go By Example
  • Variables
  • Constants
  • Number Parsing
  • Time
  • Epoch
  • Time Formatting / Parsing

Chapter 5: Control Structures

• For
• If
• Switch
• Go By Example
  • For
  • If/Else
  • Switch
  • Line Filters

Chapter 6: Arrays, Slices and Maps

• Arrays
• Slices
• Maps
• Go By Example
  • Arrays
  • Slices
  • Maps
  • Range
• Blog Posts
  • Go Slices: usage and internals
  • Arrays, Slices (and strings): The mechanics of ‘append’

Week 2

Chapter 7: Functions

• Your Second Function
• Returning Multiple Values
• Variadic Functions
• Closure
• Recursion
• Defer, Panic & Recover
• Go By Example
  • Functions
  • Multiple Return Values
  • Variadic Functions
  • Closures
  • Recursion
  • Panic
  • Defer
  • Collection Functions

Chapter 8: Pointers

• The * and & operators
  • new
• Go By Example
  • Pointers
  • Reading Files
  • Writing Files

Week 3

Chapter 9: Structs and Interfaces

• Structs
• Methods
• Interfaces
• Go By Example
  • Structs
  • Methods
  • Interfaces
  • Errors
  • JSON

Chapter 10: Concurrency

• Goroutines
• Channels
• Go By Example
  • Goroutines
  • Channels
  • Channel Buffering
  • Channel Synchronization
  • Channel Directions
  • Select
  • Timeouts
  • Non-Blocking Channel Operations
  • Closing Channels
  • Range over Channels
  • Timers
  • Tickers
  • Worker Pools
  • Rate Limiting

Week 4

• Videos
  • Lexical Scanning in Go
  • Concurrency is not parallelism
• Blog Posts
  • Share Memory By Communicating
  • A GIF decoder: an exercise in Go interfaces
  • Error handling and Go
  • Defer, Panic, and Recover

Week 5

Chapter 11: Packages

• Creating Packages
• Documentation

Chapter 12: Testing

Chapter 13: The Core Packages

• Strings
• Input / Output
• Files & Folders
• Errors
• Containers & Sort
• Hashes & Cryptography
• Servers
• Parsing Command Line Arguments
• Synchronization Primitives
• Go By Example
  • Sorting
  • Sorting by Functions
  • URL Parsing
  • SHA1 Hashes
  • Base64 Encoding
  • Atomic Counters
  • Mutexes
  • Stateful Goroutines
  • Command-Line Arguments
  • Command-Line Flags
  • Environment Variables
  • Spawning Processes
  • Exec’ing Processes
  • Signals
  • Exit

Chapter 14: Next Steps

• Study the Masters
• Make Something
• Team Up

* * *

Go is an exciting language, and a great complement to the Ruby work we do. Working through this program was a fantastic intro to the language and prepared us to create our own Go programs for great justice. Give it a shot and let us know how it goes.