To work along with this book's examples, you'll need a computer running Windows, OS X, or quite a few Linux variants that support Go. For this book, our Linux examples and notes reference Ubuntu.

If you do not already have Go 1.3 or newer installed, you will need to get it either from the binaries download page on http://golang.org/ or through your operating system's package manager.

To use all of the examples in this book, you'll also need to have the following software installed:

Your choice of IDE is a matter of personal preference, as anyone who's worked with developers can attest. That said, there are a few that lend themselves better to some languages than others and a couple that have good support for Go. This author uses Sublime Text, which plays very nice with Go, is lightweight, and allows you to build directly from within the IDE itself. Anywhere you see screenshots of code, it will be from within Sublime Text.

And while there's a good amount of baked-in support for Go code, there's also a nice plugin collection for Sublime Text called GoSublime, available at https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime.

Sublime Text isn't free, but there is a free evaluation version available that has no time limit. It's available in Windows, OS X, and Linux variants at http://www.sublimetext.com/.