About this Book

Go in Practice is a book about practical development using the Go programming language. Developers already familiar with the basics of Go will find patterns and techniques for creating Go applications. Chapters are organized around central themes (for example, chapter 10, “Communicating between cloud services”), but then explore a variety of techniques related to that theme.

How the book is organized

The 11 chapters are divided into four parts.

Part 1, “Background and fundamentals,” provides a foundation for building applications. Chapter 1 provides the background of Go for those not already familiar with it or those with a passing understanding who would like to learn more. Building console applications and servers is the topic of chapter 2, and concurrency in Go is the topic of chapter 3.

Part 2, “Well-rounded applications,” contains chapters 4 and 5. These chapters cover errors, panics, debugging, and testing. The goal of this section is to build applications you trust that handle problems well.

Part 3, “An interface for your applications,” contains three chapters with topics ranging from generating HTML and to serving assets to providing and working with APIs. Many Go applications provide web applications and REST APIs for interaction. These chapters cover patterns to aid in their construction.

Part 4, “Taking your applications to the cloud,” contains the remaining chapters, which focus on cloud computing and generating code. Go is a language built with cloud needs in mind. This section showcases patterns that enable working with those services and operating applications, sometimes as microservices, in them. It also covers generating code and metaprogramming.

There are 70 techniques explored in the book, each with its own Problem, Solution, and Discussion sections.

Code conventions and downloads

All source code in the book is presented in a mono-spaced typeface like this, which sets it off from the surrounding text. In many listings, the code is annotated to point out key concepts, and numbered bullets are sometimes used in the text to provide additional information about the code.

Source code for the examples in the book is available for download from the publisher’s website at www.manning.com/books/go-in-practice and from GitHub at github.com/Masterminds/go-in-practice.

Author Online Forum

The purchase of Go in Practice includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the authors and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/books/go-in-practice. This page provides information on how to get on the forum after you’re registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the authors can take place. It’s not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the authors, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the authors some challenging questions lest their interest stray!

The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.