Sonata

Go Essentials

3 min read

Table of Contents

Prerequisites for learning Go

Documents related to go are following a series on Udemy by Maximilian Schwarzmüller among some other prominent developers and course creators on LinkedIn Learning. To follow along with learning go, it is highly recommended to know the basics of another language.

Abstract

Functions & Methods in Go

What are Functions?

Functions are “self contained” blocks of code that accomplish a specific task. They are considered as a sequence of steps that are part of a larger application. As with any other programming language, Go has 2 types of functions:

  1. User defined functions;
  2. Built-in/Library functions.

User defined functions are functions that the developer (user) would create in order to solve or handle some logic, an example of this can be filtering JSON data and only retrieving valuable information or adding 2 numbers together to get a total.

Built-in/Library functions are functions that are created by the developers of that specific language--- in our case, go--- that provide additional functionality out of the box. For go there is a module called fmt which is a collection of formatted I/O functions that provide custom formatting of a string, similar to C’s printf or scanf.

Benefits of Functions?

  • More modular code blocks;
  • Improved readability throughout application;
  • Reusability, removing repeatability of similar logic;
  • Maintainability, being easier to maintain throughout the application life-cycle.

What are Methods?

Go does not have anything like classes, which is a popular OOP concept. However, you are able to define methods on types. A method is essentially a function with a special receiver argument.

Provided below is an example of receiver arguments in action:

package main
 
import (
	"fmt"
	mth "math"
)
 
type Vertex struct {
	X, Y float64
}
 
func (v Vertex) Abs() float64 {
	return mth.Sqrt(
		v.X * v.X + v.Y * v.Y 
	)
}
 
func main() {
	vertex := Vertex{3, 4}
	fmt.Println(vertex.Abs())
}

In the example provided above, the Abs method is taking in Vertex named v, this is the receiver argument. Also notice how you are able to use method call on the Vertex type being creating using a . and Abs() right after, rather than having to use something like this: Abs(vertex).

Conditional Logic in Go

What is Conditional Logic?

Conditional logic are series of conditional statements or a singular statement that are used to perform different actions based on various conditions and criteria being met.

They are part of the fundamentals of learning a programming language. In go, there are only a few key conditional statements that the following:

  • if statements
    • if-else statements
    • if-else if statements
  • switch cases

For go, this is all you need to take into account, it’s kept simple to promote idiomatic practices, which I prefer

Definitions

TL;DR

Extensions ✨

Courses on Go

Books to Consider Reading 📚

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