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Mastering Go: Harness the power of Go to build professional utilities and concurrent servers and services
Covering the major features and packages of Go, plus its types and datastructures, to enable the reader to write threadsafe, concurrent cloud, and network applications
Key Features Completes the Golang developer's education A deep dive into the core libraries and Golang features usually taken for granted Explains the rationale behind composite data types, Golang concurrency, and the Golang networking library Book DescriptionGo, the programming language, has become the means by which systems, networking, web and cloud applications are being implemented. Given that Go syntax is fairly easy to learn, it is on the level of libraries we start seeing features, speed, and efficiency for which the Go ecology is justly famous.
Once the syntax of Go has been mastered, and some small project have been written, most Golang programmers face the difficulty of having to integrate their Golang skills with production code. The usual introductions to Golang programming stop short of the transition, which Mastering Go provides.
The exposition of Golang begins an account of how Go has been implemented, background that makes the rationale behind Golang types and composite types much easier to understand. Another piece of the puzzle tends to be Golang data structures, which are extremely important - they encompass a whole selection of tries, for instance, and a very well reputed threadsafe package.
But the center piece of this book is to be found in its in-depth account of concurrency and systems and network programming, all of which are extremely important for modern-day native cloud development. A chapter on reflection rounds out the picture.
What you will learn Learn to understand the design choices of Golang syntax Understand enough Go internals to be able to optimize Golang code Learn and appreciate concurrency models as available in Golang Understand the interplay of systems and networking code Write server-level code that plays well in all environments Understand the context and appropriate use of Go datatypes and data structures Who This Book Is ForThe reader is supposed to have read an introductory book on Go, or to have worked through the Tour of Go or an equivalent online course. It will definitely help to remember the basic concepts of concurrency. Network programming will be explained.
About the AuthorMihalis Tsoukalos is a Unix administrator, programmer, DBA and mathematician who enjoys writing technical articles and learning new technologies. His research interests include programming languages, databases and operating systems. He holds a B.Sc in mathematics from the University of Patras and an M.Sc in IT from University College London (UK). He has written various technical articles for Sys Admin, MacTech, C/C++ Users Journal, Linux Journal, Linux User and Developer, Linux Format and Linux Voice.
682 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 31, 2021
136 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 22, 2019
[ This is a copy of my Amazon review ]
I like this book. I really do. I started learning Go reading "The Go Programming Language" which one can view as Go's K&R. But like not everyone can learn from K&R, the same holds for TGPL too. This is the gap that this book closes. You cannot be scared. You can finish the Tour of Go in Golang's web site and then start the book.
Information presented in the book is in small pieces. That is the author's style if you've also read his other book. It helps. You can read it in coffee breaks and write a few lines of the examples, compile, run, test and be happy with the result. You become immediately productive once you've mastered the concepts of the language. By that I do not mean that you magically become a Go expert programmer, but with the book you get a faster pace on the subject that matters to you. You can dive right into it as a junior Go programmer within the first week. Because the presentation style that allows for you to study in small chunks helps you with that. You will never stop halfway through a section because the break is over. You will never type lots of lines before you make an example work.
How do you eat an elephant? By eating one bit at a time. The same with Mastering Go. You master it one section at a time. That is the gift of the book.
Disclaimer: I was gifted the book by the author and the publisher as I relentlessly proof-read and corrected typing errors in his other book.
I like this book. I really do. I started learning Go reading "The Go Programming Language" which one can view as Go's K&R. But like not everyone can learn from K&R, the same holds for TGPL too. This is the gap that this book closes. You cannot be scared. You can finish the Tour of Go in Golang's web site and then start the book.
Information presented in the book is in small pieces. That is the author's style if you've also read his other book. It helps. You can read it in coffee breaks and write a few lines of the examples, compile, run, test and be happy with the result. You become immediately productive once you've mastered the concepts of the language. By that I do not mean that you magically become a Go expert programmer, but with the book you get a faster pace on the subject that matters to you. You can dive right into it as a junior Go programmer within the first week. Because the presentation style that allows for you to study in small chunks helps you with that. You will never stop halfway through a section because the break is over. You will never type lots of lines before you make an example work.
How do you eat an elephant? By eating one bit at a time. The same with Mastering Go. You master it one section at a time. That is the gift of the book.
Disclaimer: I was gifted the book by the author and the publisher as I relentlessly proof-read and corrected typing errors in his other book.
May 10, 2020
I've been reading this for months, off-and-on, because I'd been writing some Go stuff and finding it pretty straightforward (and almost nostalgic) but being not really comfortable with my strategies for structuring larger apps with its blend of pseudo-OO interfaces and not-quite-functional-but-also-highly-mutable attitude.
But, like a lot of Packt books, this consists primarily of the author taking some aspect of the topic, writing an isolated chapter on it that's about at the level of what you get from the docs, and not really adding much in the way of insight. This is almost at a cargo cult level at this point.
For instance, you don't want to (in your programming book) put up a wall of code the reader has to struggle through (unless it's just meant to be a full listing you've already covered). So what you do is break up the code bit-by-bit and explain the significance each part. You can even skip parts of the code if they're boilerplate or already covered.
This book presents the entire code every time I think, but then breaks it up this way:
This shows the first part of the code
The next few lines show the next section of the code
And here's the last section of the code
And in a lot of cases, that's all the explanation there is. Sometimes it's because that's all that's needed and others it's probably due to word counts or page quotas or something related to the mechanical process of publishing. But is extraordinarily unenlightening.
The English is otherwise passable (unlike some other Packt books I've read recently) but the number of times I went to the official docs for clarification was very high.
Look, here's the thing: Official docs tend to be very dry and deal with the mechanics of things. You get a book like this to tell you why things are done a certain way, and what problems they might solve. Pointing out that Go has three different data structures in its standard library, and then running through some already fairly intuitive interfaces is not very helpful. We code to solve problems: When you give me an example of a Heap, tell me what problem I might uniquely solve with it.
The interface stuff is especially bad, with interfaces called A and B and instances that are also one letter and demonstrate on a basic level a very minor "this is how you'd do something trivial" but no real depth.
At one point, the author says, hey, if you want to design something OO, you're out of luck. Maybe go use Python. (Another weird side note, we learn he doesn't like Java, apparently, so he wouldn't recommend it. Newsflash: A lot of people don't like Java and that has very little bearing on whether or not it's useful to learn.)
I can only assume the economics of writing tech books in the 21st century is so bad, publishing houses are just luring whomever they can convince to throw words on a page, not really editing either on a language or tech level, and just churning stuff out on every conceivable topic figuring to sucker guys like me into their $10/month plans.
But, like a lot of Packt books, this consists primarily of the author taking some aspect of the topic, writing an isolated chapter on it that's about at the level of what you get from the docs, and not really adding much in the way of insight. This is almost at a cargo cult level at this point.
For instance, you don't want to (in your programming book) put up a wall of code the reader has to struggle through (unless it's just meant to be a full listing you've already covered). So what you do is break up the code bit-by-bit and explain the significance each part. You can even skip parts of the code if they're boilerplate or already covered.
This book presents the entire code every time I think, but then breaks it up this way:
This shows the first part of the code
The next few lines show the next section of the code
And here's the last section of the code
And in a lot of cases, that's all the explanation there is. Sometimes it's because that's all that's needed and others it's probably due to word counts or page quotas or something related to the mechanical process of publishing. But is extraordinarily unenlightening.
The English is otherwise passable (unlike some other Packt books I've read recently) but the number of times I went to the official docs for clarification was very high.
Look, here's the thing: Official docs tend to be very dry and deal with the mechanics of things. You get a book like this to tell you why things are done a certain way, and what problems they might solve. Pointing out that Go has three different data structures in its standard library, and then running through some already fairly intuitive interfaces is not very helpful. We code to solve problems: When you give me an example of a Heap, tell me what problem I might uniquely solve with it.
The interface stuff is especially bad, with interfaces called A and B and instances that are also one letter and demonstrate on a basic level a very minor "this is how you'd do something trivial" but no real depth.
At one point, the author says, hey, if you want to design something OO, you're out of luck. Maybe go use Python. (Another weird side note, we learn he doesn't like Java, apparently, so he wouldn't recommend it. Newsflash: A lot of people don't like Java and that has very little bearing on whether or not it's useful to learn.)
I can only assume the economics of writing tech books in the 21st century is so bad, publishing houses are just luring whomever they can convince to throw words on a page, not really editing either on a language or tech level, and just churning stuff out on every conceivable topic figuring to sucker guys like me into their $10/month plans.
May 16, 2020
A large semi-organized cookbook of different things you can do with Go. Not all the samples are of equal quality (some crash, other just look awful). Overall I can’t even say what is the target audience of this book.
August 22, 2019
Good examples and explanation. I also like exercises. I would not recommend this book for beginners. I use this book more for expanding Go knowledge and for looking at examples.
June 26, 2020
Just a very good overview of Go language capabilities. Nothing more, nothing less... Go appears quite easy to start and it is very strong in regards to server-side programming.
August 30, 2020
It's a good book to review the basics of Go and different use cases until a little bit of statistics and machine learning.
August 31, 2021
a master
January 17, 2022
Good info about go programming language
July 31, 2022
I was expecting more advanced concept and explanation based on the title.
February 10, 2024
Fine book, but the title is deceiving. It is project focused, and you can learn while building something together. But you won’t be mastering go with it.
January 31, 2025
Good for juniors
August 2, 2023
Appendix A on the Go garbage collector caught my attention, but other than that, there wasn't anything noteworthy.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews