Go - Overview

Go is a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind.It was initially developed at Google in year 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is strongly and statically typed, provides inbuilt support for garbage collection and supports concurrent programming.

Go - Environment Setup

Try it Option Online

You really do not need to set up your own environment to start learning Go programming language. Reason is very simple, we already have set up Go Programming environment online, so that you can compile and execute all the available examples online at the same time when you are doing your theory work.

Go - Program Structure

Before we study basic building blocks of the Go programming language, let us look a bare minimum Go program structure so that we can take it as a reference in upcoming chapters.

Go - Basic Syntax

You have seen a basic structure of Go program, so it will be easy to understand other basic building blocks of the Go programming language.

Go - Data Types

In the Go programming language, data types refer to an extensive system used for declaring variables or functions of different types. The type of a variable determines how much space it occupies in storage and how the bit pattern stored is interpreted.

Go - Variables

A variable is nothing but a name given to a storage area that our programs can manipulate. Each variable in Go has a specific type, which determines the size and layout of the variable's memory; the range of values that can be stored within that memory; and the set of operations that can be applied to the variable.

Go - Constants

The constants refer to fixed values that the program may not alter during its execution. These fixed values are also called literals.
Constants can be of any of the basic data types like an integer constant, a floating constant, a character constant, or a string literal. There are also enumeration constants as well.
The constants are treated just like regular variables except that their values cannot be modified after their definition.

Go - Operators

An operator is a symbol that tells the compiler to perform specific mathematical or logical manipulations. Go language is rich in built-in operators and provides the following types of operators:

• Arithmetic Operators
• Relational Operators
• Logical Operators
• Bitwise Operators
• Assignment Operators
• Misc Operators
  

Go - Decision Making

Decision making structures require that the programmer specify one or more conditions to be evaluated or tested by the program, along with a statement or statements to be executed if the condition is determined to be true, and optionally, other statements to be executed if the condition is determined to be false.

Go - Loops

There may be a situation, when you need to execute a block of code several number of times. In general, statements are executed sequentially: The first statement in a function is executed first, followed by the second, and so on.

Go - Functions

A function is a group of statements that together perform a task. Every Go program has at least one function, which is main(), and all the most trivial programs can define additional functions.

Go - Scope Rules

A scope in any programming is a region of the program where a defined variable can have its existence and beyond that variable can not be accessed. There are three places where variables can be declared in C programming language:

Go - Arrays

Go programming language provides a data structure called the array, which can store a fixed-size sequential collection of elements of the same type. An array is used to store a collection of data, but it is often more useful to think of an array as a collection of variables of the same type.

Go - Pointers

Pointers in Go are easy and fun to learn. Some Go programming tasks are performed more easily with pointers, and other tasks, such as call by reference, cannot be performed without using pointers. So it becomes necessary to learn pointers to become a perfect Go programmer. Let's start learning them in simple and easy steps.

Go - Structures

Go arrays allow you to define type of variables that can hold several data items of the same kind but structure is another user defined data type available in Go programming, which allows you to combine data items of different kinds.

Go - Slices

Go Slice is an abstraction over Go Array. As Go Array allows you to define type of variables that can hold several data items of the same kind but it do not provide any inbuilt method to increase size of it dynamically or get a sub-array of its own. Slices covers this limitation. It provides many utility functions required on Array and is widely used in Go programming.

Go - Range

The range keyword is used in for loop to iterate over items of an array, slice, channel or map. With array and slices, it returns the index of the item as integer. With maps, it returns the key of the next key-value pair. Range either returns one value or two. If only one value is used on the left of a range expression, it is the 1st value in the following table.

Go - Maps

Go provides another important data type map which maps unique keys to values. A key is an object that you use to retrieve a value at a later date. Given a key and a value, you can strore the value in a Map object. After value is stored, you can retrieve it by using its key.

Go - Recursion

Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. Same applies in programming languages as well where if a programming allows you to call a function inside the same function that is called recursive call of the function as follows.

Go - Type Casting

Type casting is a way to convert a variable from one data type to another data type. For example, if you want to store a long value into a simple integer then you can type cast long to int. You can convert values from one type to another using the cast operator as following: