Introductory Go Programming Tutorial

Jay Ts — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 13:00:00 +0000

How to get started with this useful new programming language.

You've probably heard of Go. Like any new programming language, it took a while to mature and stabilize to the point where it became useful for production applications. Nowadays, Go is a well established language that is used in web development, writing DevOps tools, network programming and databases. It was used to write Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and Ethereum. Go is accelerating in popularity, with adoption increasing by 76% in 2017, and there now are Go user groups and Go conferences. Whether you want to add to your professional skills or are just interested in learning a new programming language, you should check it out.

Go History

A team of three programmers at Google created Go: Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. The team decided to create Go because they were frustrated with C++ and Java, which through the years have become cumbersome and clumsy to work with. They wanted to bring enjoyment and productivity back to programming.

The three have impressive accomplishments. Griesemer worked on Google's ultra-fast V8 JavaScript engine used in the Chrome web browser, Node.js JavaScript runtime environment and elsewhere. Pike and Thompson were part of the original Bell Labs team that created UNIX, the C language and UNIX utilities, which led to the development of the GNU utilities and Linux. Thompson wrote the very first version of UNIX and created the B programming language, upon which C was based. Later, Thompson and Pike worked on the Plan 9 operating system team, and they also worked together to define the UTF-8 character encoding.

Why Go?

Go has the safety of static typing and garbage collection along with the speed of a compiled language. With other languages, "compiled" and "garbage collection" are associated with waiting around for the compiler to finish and then getting programs that run slowly. But Go has a lightning-fast compiler that makes compile times barely noticeable and a modern, ultra-efficient garbage collector. You get fast compile times along with fast programs. Go has concise syntax and grammar with few keywords, giving Go the simplicity and fun of dynamically typed interpreted languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript.

The idea of Go's design is to have the best parts of many languages. At first, Go looks a lot like a hybrid of C and Pascal (both of which are successors to Algol 60), but looking closer, you will find ideas taken from many other languages as well.

Go is designed to be a simple compiled language that is easy to use, while allowing concisely written programs that run efficiently. Go lacks extraneous features, so it's easy to program fluently, without needing to refer to language documentation while programming. Programming in Go is fast, fun and productive.

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Linux Journal October 2018: Programming

Carlie Fairchild — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 14:59:55 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

Welcome to the Programming issue, October 2018, of Linux Journal. This month we highlight programming languages new and old including Go, Rust, Clojure and Bash. Take a look at this month's complete line-up:

Featured articles in this issue include:

Understanding Bash: Elements of Programming** This article is available online now as a sneak peak in to our October issue.
Getting Started with Rust: Working with Files and Doing File I/O
Introductory Go Programming Tutorial
Creating Linux Command-Line Tools in Clojure

Additional articles:

Shall We Study Amazon's Pricing Together?
Review: System76 Oryx Pro Laptop
3D-Printed Firearms Are Blowing Up
FOSS Project Spotlight: Tutanota, the First Encrypted Email Service with an App on F-Droid
Introducing Genius, the Advanced Scientific Calculator for Linux

Columns:

Kyle Rankin's Hack and /: Papa's Got a Brand New NAS: the Software
Shawn Powers' The Open-Source Classroom: Have a Plan for Netplan
Reuven M. Lerner's At the Forge: Automate Sysadmin Tasks with Python's os.walk Function
Dave Taylor's Work the Shell: Normalizing Filenames and Data with Bash
Zack Brown's diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development
Glyn Moody's Open Sauce: Now Is the Time to Start Planning for the Post-Android World

Subscribers, you can download your October issue now.

Not a subscriber? It’s not too late. Subscribe today and receive instant access to this and ALL back issues since 1994!

Want to buy a single issue? Buy the August magazine or other single back issues in the LJ store.

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