If you're thinking about engineering the next big dotcom application then you should seriously consider using Go!!
The Go Programming Language is without doubt one of the hottest languages to learn, particularly in this cloud native era. More and more companies are adopting Go to engineer highly performant, stable and maintainable applications. Popular projects such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Etcd, Istio, InfluxDB have all been built successfully using Go!!
This introductory level training course is designed to bring you quickly up to speed with the many key features that the Go programming language provides. You'll also learn how to setup your own Go development environment - consisting of the Go toolchain, Visual Studio Code, and several related Go based extensions - all to ensure that you are able to be productive writing your own source code.
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Learning Objectives
By completing this course, you will:
- Learn about what makes Go a great language
- Learn how to install the Go toolchain
- Learn how to setup Visual Studio Code to edit and debug Go programs
- Learn how to work with the Go Playground to test and run snippets of Go code
- Learn and understand the basic Go language syntax and features
- Learn how to use the Go tool chain commands to compile, test, and manage Go code
- And finally, you’ll learn how to work with and manage Go modules for module dependency management
Intended Audience
This course is intended for:
- Anyone interested in learning the Go Programming Language
- Software Developers interested in using Go to compile and test Go based applications
- DevOps practitioners looking to learn about Go to support Go based applications
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course, you should have at least:
- A basic understanding of software development and the software development life cycle
Source Code
All sample Go source code as used and demonstrated within this course can be found here:
- [Jeremy Cook] I briefly mentioned the use of the range keyword for iterating over arrays. Range can actually be used to iterate over not only arrays, but also slices and maps. We can see this in action here.
On line 11, I'm creating a byte slice of ints, containing some mystery numbers. Lines 12 through to 17, I then use the range keyword to iterate over the byte slice and then convert each number to its equivalent character value, with the final result being CloudAcademy after the iteration finishes. Lines 22 to 24 demonstrate how to use range to iterate over a map. This particular example shows how to receive both the key and value for each item returned during the iteration. The next example, spanning lines 26 to 28, shows how to iterate over the same map, but this time using the underscore character to discard the key, since in this example, we're only interested in the value. If we were to declare the key in the same way as the previous example on lines 22 to 24, but were not to reference it within the for loop, then the compiler would throw a declared and not used error, hence why the underscore is used.
The final example on lines 30 to 32 demonstrates the alternate requirement of working with just the key and not the value.
In summary, you have observed how to use the range keyword to support iterating over arrays, slices, and maps and how to use the underscore character to suppress compile time errors when not requiring to use the key within the for loop iteration.
Jeremy is a Content Lead Architect and DevOps SME here at Cloud Academy where he specializes in developing DevOps technical training documentation.
He has a strong background in software engineering, and has been coding with various languages, frameworks, and systems for the past 25+ years. In recent times, Jeremy has been focused on DevOps, Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Security, Kubernetes, and Machine Learning.
Jeremy holds professional certifications for AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD, CKS).