Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming

Go is rapidly becoming the preferred language for building web services. While there are plenty of tutorials available that teach Go's syntax to developers with experience in other programming languages, tutorials aren't enough. They don't teach Go's idioms, so developers end up recreating patterns that don't make sense in a Go context. This practical guide provides the essential background you need to write clear and idiomatic Go.

No matter your level of experience, you'll learn how to think like a Go developer. Author Jon Bodner introduces the design patterns experienced Go developers have adopted and explores the rationale for using them. You'll also get a preview of Go's upcoming generics support and how it fits into the language.

• Learn how to write idiomatic code in Go and design a Go project
• Understand the reasons for the design decisions in Go
• Set up a Go development environment for a solo developer or team
• Learn how and when to use reflection, unsafe, and cgo
• Discover how Go's features allow the language to run efficiently
• Know which Go features you should use sparingly or not at all

Jon Bodner has been a software engineer, lead developer and architect for over 20 years. In that time, he has worked on software across many fields, including education, finance, commerce, healthcare, law, government, and internet infrastructure.

Jon is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, where he has contributed to their development and testing workflow, developed patented techniques for web payment page detection and population, and co-authored tools for finding and managing software development issues.

Jon is a frequent speaker at Go conferences, and his blog posts on Go and software engineering have been viewed more than 300,000 times. He is the creator of the Proteus data access library (github.com/jonbodner/proteus) and co-developer of checks-out, a fork of the LGTM project (github.com/capitalone/checks-out).