Practical Go for Developers

ArdanLabs ∴ 2025

This repo contains the material for the "Practical Go Foundations" class. The code & links are synced with the online class.

This is an assorted collection of exercises for teaching, not a real Go project.

Setting Up

We highly recommend that you set up a local working environment and follow along with the videos. To setup a local environment install the following: - The Go SDK either from your package manager (brew, apt, choco ...) or from here - git - And IDE such as VSCode with the Go extension or GoLand

However, if you want to jump right in, you can use GitHub codespaces with the course repository. To start a codespaces follow these steps:

• Click on the green "<> Code" button
• Select the "Codespaces" tab
• Click on the green "Create codespace on main" button

After a while you should have a new tab with Visual Studio Code already set up. You can read more about codespaces here.

Miki Tebeka miki@ardanlabs.com, @tebeka, mikitebeka, blog, medium.

Shameless Plugs

• Go Essential Training - LinkedIn Learning
  • Rest of classes
• Go Brain Teasers book
  • Rest of books

Code

• hw.go - Hello World
• banner.go - Working with strings, Unicode
• github.go - Calling REST APIs, JSON
• kill_server.go - Working with files, defer, error handling
• div.go - Handling panics
• sha1.go - Using io.Reader and io.Writer
• cart.go - Working with slices
• game.go - Structs, methods & interfaces
• empty.go - The empty interface
• stats.go - Using generics
• freq.go - Processing text, regular expressions
• go_chan.go - Goroutines and channels
• urls.go - Fan out patterns
• taxi_check.go - Convert sequential code to concurrent
• count.go - Using mutex and atomic, the race detector
• select.go - Using select, context for timeout and cancellation
• rtb.go - Using context for timeouts
• nlp - nlp project

Links

• GoReleaser - Building Go executables
• HTTP status cats
• errors package (Go 1.13)
• encoding/json
• net/http
• Numbers
  • math/big - Big numbers
  • Numeric types
• Strings
  • Unicode table
  • strings package - string utilities
  • Go strings
  • Plain Text - Great Video on Unicode
• Go Proverbs - Think about them ☺
• Annotated "Hello World"
• Effective Go - Read this!
• Go standard library - official documentation
• A Tour of Go
• Setting Up
  • The Go SDK
  • git
  • IDE's: Visual Studio Code + Go extension or Goland (paid)
• Hyrum's Law
• regex101 - Regular expression builder
• sort examples - Read and try to understand
• When to use generics
• Generics tutorial
• Methods, interfaces & embedded types in Go
• Methods & Interfaces in the Go tour
• Slices
  • Slices & Slice internals on the Go blog
  • Slice tricks
• Error Handling
  • Defer, Panic and Recover
  • errors package (Go 1.13)
  • pkg/errors
• Composition over inheritance
• The race detector
• Uber Go Style Guide
• errgroup
• Data Race Patterns in Go
• Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines and cancellation
• Go Concurrency Patterns: Context
• Curious Channels
• The Behavior of Channels
• Channel Semantics
• Why are there nil channels in Go?
• Amdahl's Law - Limits of concurrency
• Computer Latency at Human Scale
• Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike
• Scheduling in Go by Bill Kennedy
• The cost of Go's panic and recover
• Conway's Law
• The Twelve-Factor App
• Configuration
  • conf
  • viper & cobra
• Logging
  • Built-in slog
  • uber/zap
• Metrics
  • Built-in expvar
  • Open Telemetry
  • Prometheus
• External web servers:
  • chi - Miki's favorite (after stdlib :)
  • gorilla - Old timer
  • Gin - Popular framework
  • fasthttp - Low level and fast
• Go Code Review Comments
• Tutorial: Getting started with multi-module workspaces
• Example Project Structure
• Organizing a Go module
• How to Write Go Code
• Documentation
  • Godoc: documenting Go code
  • Go Doc Comments
  • Testable examples in Go
  • Go documentation tricks
  • gob/doc.go of the gob package. Generates this documentation
  • go install golang.org/x/pkgsite/cmd/pkgsite@latest (require go 1.18+)
  • pkgsite -http=:8080 (open browser on http://localhost:8080/${module name})
• Out Software Dependency Problem - Good read on dependencies by Russ Cox
• Linters (static analysis)
  • staticcheck
  • golangci-lint
  • gosec - Security oriented
  • vulncheck - Check for CVEs
  • golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis - Helpers to write analysis tools (see example)
• Testing
  • testing
  • testify - Many test utilities (including suites & mocking)
  • Ginkgo
  • Tutorial: Getting started with fuzzing
    • testing/quick - Initial fuzzing library
  • test containers
• HTTP Servers
  • net/http
  • net/http/httptest
  • chi - A nice web framework

Data & Other

• G☺
• ♡
• http.log.gz
• https://api.github.com/users/tebeka
• Slides
• Unicode
• Cost of errors
• sherlock.txt
• slices
• rtb.go
• taxi.tar
• flags - More types for the built-in flag package
• nlp.go
• stemmer.go
• tokenize_cases.toml
  • github.com/BurntSushi/toml