Table of Contents

Tables xv

Introduction 1

Why Go? 1

The Structure of the Book 4

Acknowledgments 5

Chapter 1: An Overview in Five Examples 7

1.1. Getting Going 7

1.2. Editing, Compiling, and Running 9

1.3. Hello Who? 14

1.4. Big Digits–Two-Dimensional Slices 16

1.5. Stack–Custom Types with Methods 21

1.6. Americanise–Files, Maps, and Closures 29

1.7. Polar to Cartesian–Concurrency 40

1.8. Exercise 48

Chapter 2: Booleans and Numbers 51

2.1. Preliminaries 51

2.2. Boolean Values and Expressions 56

2.3. Numeric Types 57

2.4. Example: Statistics 72

2.5. Exercises 78

Chapter 3: Strings 81

3.1. Literals, Operators, and Escapes 83

3.2. Comparing Strings 86

3.3. Characters and Strings 87

3.4. Indexing and Slicing Strings 90

3.5. String Formatting with the Fmt Package 93

3.6. Other String-Related Packages 106

3.7. Example: M3u2pls 130

3.8. Exercises 135

Chapter 4: Collection Types 139

4.1. Values, Pointers, and Reference Types 140

4.2. Arrays and Slices 148

4.3. Maps 164

4.4. Examples 171

4.5. Exercises 180

Chapter 5: Procedural Programming 185

5.1. Statement Basics 186

5.2. Branching 192

5.3. Looping with For Statements 203

5.4. Communication and Concurrency Statements 205

5.5. Defer, Panic, and Recover 212

5.6. Custom Functions 219

5.7. Example: Indent Sort 244

5.8. Exercises 250

Chapter 6: Object-Oriented Programming 253

6.1. Key Concepts 254

6.2. Custom Types 256

6.3. Interfaces 265

6.4. Structs 275

6.5. Examples 282

6.6. Exercises 311

Chapter 7: Concurrent Programming 315

7.1. Key Concepts317

7.2. Examples 322

7.3. Exercises 357

Chapter 8: File Handling 361

8.1. Custom Data Files 362

8.2. Archive Files 397

8.3. Exercises 405

Chapter 9: Packages 407

9.1. Custom Packages 408

9.2. Third-Party Packages 417

9.3. A Brief Survey of Go’s Commands 418

9.4. A Brief Survey of the Go Standard Library 419

9.5. Exercises 431

Appendix A: Epilogue 435

Appendix B: The Dangers of Software Patents 437

Appendix C: Selected Bibliography 441

Index 443

About the Author

Mark Summerfield, owner of Qtrac Ltd., is an independent trainer, consultant, technical editor, and writer specializing in Go, Python, C++, Qt, and PyQt. His books include Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt (Prentice Hall, 2007), C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (with Jasmin Blanchette, Prentice Hall, 2008), Programming in Python 3, Second Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2009), and Advanced Qt Programming (Prentice Hall, 2010).