Welcome to the first chapter of our journey, where we will learn about full stack development in Go. This chapter is dedicated to readers who are not yet familiar with Go. If you are already proficient in the Go language, you can skip this chapter. We'll cover the basic building blocks that form the foundation of the Go language, which will be covered in a brief but practical manner. Then, we'll show you the Go syntax for basic programming constructs like functions and loops. We'll also cover some concepts that are specific to Go like slice, panic, and defer. This chapter assumes that you have some familiarity with programming concepts in general (like variables, functions, loops, and conditional statements). This chapter also assumes that you have some familiarity with Terminals, and command lines, as well as the concept of environmental variables.

A very good resource to learn about the Go language from scratch can be found at tour.golang.org.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Basic concepts—packages, variables, data types, and pointers
• Functions and closures
• Conditional statements and loops
• panic, recover, and defer
• Go data structures
• Go interfaces