A Go Developer's Notebook
A Go Developer's Notebook
or, What I Do During My Holidays
About the Book
This is the book that I wish had existed when I first started exploring the Go language, built around code examples I could have played with at my own pace.
It's also like the book I wish had existed when I first started programming - an amalgam of the magazine articles which taught me to code and the wisdom (or not) conferred by thirty-plus years of doing just that. I hope it's as readable to the interested teenager taking their first steps into hacking as it is the university graduate armed with a wealth of theory but looking for practical insight.
It's also more generally a book about reading and writing code, and about many areas of computing which fascinate me. Perhaps they'll fascinate you too!
One thing this isn't is a professional book, by which I mean that it's not concerned with helping a professional developer quickly transition from another programming language to Go. There are plenty of those already in print, written by much better teachers than me. Instead my aim in this text is to provide a much deeper exploration of subjects I'm interested in through the lens of Go, teaching the language almost as an after-thought.
The didactic style is brutally simple and old-school: write code, explain code, modify code, explain changes, repeat as necessary. Along the way I'll do my best to explain what each example is trying to achieve, and the thinking which evolves it towards its final form.
Each chapter is built around a particular programming task which I use to demonstrate how various features of the Go language can be used as well as to share many of the things I've learned during several decades of coding. Some of these programming tasks may appear deceptively simple, others totally irrelevant to the life of a commercial developer. I intend to disabuse you of both notions, whilst at the same time keeping this a Hacker's Notebook: depending on your outlook this is either a logbook of experiments undertaken and rabbit-holes delved in pursuit of knowledge, or a grimoire of the esoteric and unutterably unconscionable.
If the choice of subject matter at times seems eccentric, remember that my target audience is my teenage self, hunched starry eyed and clueless over an 8-bit micro, not the fortysomething code diva I've since become. My teenage self knew nothing about reading code, testing, refactoring, the scientific method, clean coding style, or academic theory.
As the reader you don't need to know any of these things either, though if you do I hope you'll still find some useful nuggets to add to your toolkit.
So in essence this is a book inspired by my love of programming for the sake of programming, my disillusionment with the widespread desire to teach professional programming at the expense of exploration and fun, and my hope that readers of all ages will find the same pleasure in reading this book that I've experienced in researching and writing it.
There's a google plus community for discussions and a public github repo with the code for each completed narrative section.
To further whet your appetite I provide a free sample comprising an introduction to concurrent network programming with Go that includes practical encryption and is probably sufficient for a professional developer to get up to speed with the language. If that's all you're after, enjoy this free gift.
I've also given a brief presentation on the philosophy behind this living book.
Table of Contents
-
- Preface
-
Introducing Go
-
- Getting Started
-
So what is Go?
- Open source
- Efficient compilation
- Efficient execution
- Ease of programming
- And where did it come from?
- Into the wild
- Where next?
-
Hello World
- Packages
- Constants
- Variables
- Functions
- Encapsulation
- Generalisation
- Startup
- HTTP
- The Environment
- Handling Signals
- TCP/IP
- UDP
- RSA obfuscated UDP
- Error Handling
- Exceptions
-
Echo
- Arguments
- Flags
-
Command-line Boilerplate and Standard I/O
- Conditional Flags
- Errors
-
-
Going Loopy
-
- Adventures in Iteration
-
Linear Sequences
- The for {} construct
- User Defined Slices
- Iterating Through Arrays
- Arrays and Slices Exposed
- Iteration and structured types
-
mappings
- Iteration and maps
-
-
Software Machines
-
Software Machines
- array stacks
- cactus stacks
- hash maps
- heaps
- switch dispatchers
- direct threaded dispatchers
- indirect threaded dispatchers
- assembler
- tail calls
- architectures
- fun with types
- timers
- Instruction Set
- processor core
- accumulator machine
- stack machine
- register machine
- vector machine
-
Software Machines
- memory
-
Software Machines
-
Functional Programming
-
- Metaprogramming and First-Class Functions
- Pure Functions, Expressions, and Recursion
- Partial Application and Currying
- Lazy Evaluation and Memoization
- Infinite Series and Data Structures
- Immutability
- Category Theory
-
Functions
-
The Machine View
- Adding Human Readability
- Procedures and Functions in Go
- The Mathematical View
-
Simple Factorials
- First-Class and Higher-Order Functions
- Closures
- Currying
-
Recursion
- funcs() Which Call Themselves
- Mathematical Functions Which Call Themselves
- Error Handling the Go Way
- Changing Types
-
The Machine View
-
Memoization
- A Shallow Introduction to Big-O Notation
-
In-Memory Caching
- Private Caches
- Caches in Hashes
- Once Upon A Flat File
-
Let’s Talk About Type
- utility.go
- cache.go
- main.go
-
A Generalised Cache
- cache.go
- utility.go
- factorial.go
- diskcache.go
- main.go
-
Explicitly Layered Caching
- A Dedicated Memory Cache
- Writing Files in a Functional Manner
- Preventing Concurrent Writes
- Sharing Locks Between Processes
-
-
Odds & Sods
-
Maps and Hashes
- Go maps
- A simple Map implementation
-
Types
-
Interfaces
- Interfaces, pt 1
- package adder
-
Interfaces
-
Pretty Pictures
- Basic Mandelbrot
- Phong Shading
- Communication by Sharing
-
Concurrency
- synchronous
- asynchronous
- map/reduce
- map/reduce
-
Errors, Exceptions & Flow Control
- Catch & Throw
- Stack Traces
- Exceptions
-
Duck Typing, Reflection and Type Manipulation
- package generalise
- raw
-
Beyond Go
-
Interfacing with Dynamic Libraries
- SQLite 3
- Ruby?
-
Interfacing with Dynamic Libraries
-
Maps and Hashes
- Notes
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
80% Royalties. Earn $16 on a $20 book.
We pay 80% royalties. That's not a typo: you earn $16 on a $20 sale. If we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book or course for $20, you'll earn $80,000.
(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)
In fact, authors have earned$12,307,240writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Personal Finance
Jason AndersonThis textbook provides an in-depth analysis on personal finance that is both practical and straightforward in its approach. It has been written in such a way that the readers can gain knowledge without getting overwhelmed by the technical terms. Suitable for both beginners and advanced learners.
Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA
Trisha Gee and Helen ScottIf we treat our IDE as a text editor, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Using a combination of tutorials and a questions-and-answers approach, Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA will help you find ways to use IntelliJ IDEA that enable you to work comfortably and productively as a professional developer.
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
Mastering STM32 - Second Edition
Carmine NovielloWith more than 1200 microcontrollers, STM32 is probably the most complete ARM Cortex-M platform on the market. This book aims to be the most complete guide around introducing the reader to this exciting MCU portfolio from ST Microelectronics and its official CubeHAL and STM32CubeIDE development environment.
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
Machine Learning Q and AI
Sebastian Raschka, PhDHave you recently completed a machine learning or deep learning course and wondered what to learn next? With 30 questions and answers on key concepts in machine learning and AI, this book provides bite-sized bits of knowledge for your journey to becoming a machine learning expert.
Stats One
William FooteThe Rails 7 Way
Obie Fernandez, Lucas Dohmen, and Tom Henrik AadlandThe Rails™ 7 Way is the comprehensive, authoritative reference guide for professionals delivering production-quality code using modern Ruby on Rails. It illuminates the entire Rails 7 API, its most powerful idioms, design approaches, and libraries. Building on the previous editions, this edition has been heavily refactored and updated.
Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails
Stephan HagemannGet yourself a new tool to manage your Rails application and your growing engineering organization! Prevent the ball-of-mud (and fix it!). Go for microservices or SOA if it makes sense not just because you don't have any other tool. Do all this through a low-overhead tool: packages. Enable better conversations to make practical changes today.
Top Bundles
- #1
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #2
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #3
1500 QUIZ COMMENTATI (3 libri)
3 Books
Tre libri dei QUIZ MMG Commentati al prezzo di DUE! I QUIZ dei concorsi ufficiali di Medicina Generale relativi agli anni: 2000-2001-2003-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017-2018-2019-2020-2021 +100 inediti Raccolti in unico bundle per aiutarvi nello studio e nella preparazione al concorso. All'interno di ogni libro i quiz sono stati suddivisi per... - #4
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #5
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #6
Modern C++ Collection
3 Books
Get All about Modern C++C++ Standard Library, including C++20Concurrency with Modern C++, including C++20C++20Each book has about 200 complete code examples. Updates are included. When I update one of the books, you immediately get the updated bundle. You can expect significant updates to each new C++ standard (C++23, C++26, .. ) and also... - #7
Linux Administration Complet
4 Books
Ce lot comprend les quatre volumes du Guide Linux Administration :Linux Administration, Volume 1, Administration fondamentale : Guide pratique de préparation aux examens de certification LPIC 1, Linux Essentials, RHCSA et LFCS. Administration fondamentale. Introduction à Linux. Le Shell. Traitement du texte. Arborescence de fichiers. Sécurité... - #9
Development and Deployment of Multiplayer Online Games, Part ARCH. Architecture (Vol. I-III)
3 Books
What's the Big Idea? The idea behind this book is to summarize the body of knowledge that already exists on multiplayer games but is not available in one single place.And quite a fewof the issues discussed within this series (planned as three nine volumes ~300 pages each), while known in the industry, have not been published at all (except for... - #10
Growing Agile: The Complete Coach's Guide
7 Books
Growing Agile: Coach's Guide Series This bundle provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, handouts and activity...