paddycarey / go-102

A workshop to give someone their first practical experience of Go

Go 102

Overview

Go is a small language, but one with a few differences to many common languages. For example, Go supports an OO-style of development, but doesn't have classes, and it has built-in primitives to simplify concurrent programming.

The content in this book is aimed at introducing these concepts to someone new to Go (but not new to programming in general). The content is split in to the following sections:

• Introduction: built-in types, variable declaration, function and custom types.
• Object-oriented development
  • Methods
  • Interfaces
  • Embedding
  • Composition
• Concurrency
  • Goroutines
  • Channels

Each section explains the relevant concepts, walks through a number of examples and code samples, and ends with an exercise to put the concepts in to practice.

Pre-Requisites

Although you need have no real experience with Go itself, this is not a "learning to code" guide. Specifically, you are expected to have practical experience with the principles behind object-oriented software development (in any language).

Exercises

There are templates available for each of the exercises. If you've cloned this repository under your $GOPATH then you can just edit and run the template file in place. Alternatively, follow the link to the template already set up in the Go Playground, and work from there instead.

• The Basics: source / playground
• Object Orientation
  • Methods: source / playground
  • Interfaces: source / playground
  • Embedding: source / playground
• Concurrency
  • Goroutines: source / playground
  • Channels: source / playground

Example solutions are also available, but don't look at those until you've had a go yourself!

Running a Workshop

This guide can be used as an individual study-aid, but it was designed to be presented as a hands-on workshop. In this format, the workshop should take around four hours, with each section talked through by the presenter, before the participants work through the relevant exercise (preferably in pairs). An accompanying slide deck is available on Speaker Deck.

Source and Contributing

The source for this material is available on GitHub. Please raise any issues there, and contributions (fixing typos, better formatting, improvements to code examples etc) are more than welcome.

Attribution

The gopher image on the cover is by Renee French. The buffered and unbuffered channel images are from Ardan Labs.

License

Except where otherwise noted, the content of this repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.