Wrapping Your Head Around Go (Golang)

Download and install go from the official site and familiarize yourself with the documentation. Set up a go path workspace with source, packaged, and bean directories, and export your path.

Set up your go path and bin, create a Hello world program in a main package, import fmt, then build and install it with go build and go install.

Master go fmt for consistent formatting and auto-format on save, and use go doc with Go Dark Dawg for offline, fast access to explore standard and third-party packages.

Explore Go variable declarations, including verbose var with type, type inference, and short declaration, then examine package-wide variables, exported versus private identifiers, and grouping with constants.

Create a new go project called control structures, implement the if statement with else and boolean expressions, then use the for loop for c-style and indefinite iterations, breaking when needed.

Explore writing Go functions with the func keyword, declare inputs and return values, including multiple returns, and apply examples like doubling ints and parsing names with strings.Split, plus anonymous functions.

Explore how Go pointers let functions reference and modify variables, instead of copying values. Learn to declare int pointers, use & to create them, and * to dereference.

Learn to build a simple static file server in Go using the standard library, with a configurable port via the flag package, serving files from the current directory.

Explore how slices extend Go arrays, enabling efficient append, range-based selection, and indexing. Learn to declare, slice ranges, and iterate with range to manage data quickly.

Explore maps in Go as typed key-value stores, initialize with make or braces, insert, look up with square brackets, delete with delete, loop with range, and print name-age pairs.

Learn to load and parse a JSON config in Go with a loadConfig function returning a map[string]interface{} and an error for your static site generator.

Explore Go types and structs, declare and initialize types like point and rect, use dot syntax to access fields, and attach a method to compute a rectangle's area.

Explore how interfaces in Go generalize behavior by defining an Animal interface with name and pet methods, enabling clean, reusable complement logic for cats and dogs.

Create a fast static site generator in Go that converts markdown to HTML with blackfriday. Build a command line tool that reads inputs, handles arguments, and outputs HTML.

Create a Go pages package to load a config and markdown, define a page struct with title, author, html, and file, and render to html.

Polish a static site generator by adding a render method to the page struct that writes HTML to a layout via the io.Writer using the go text/template system.

Differentiate concurrency from parallelism in Go, and explore how the Go scheduler optimizes work on a single core using go routines, channels, and the select statement.

Explore how go routines enable concurrency by scheduling lightweight tasks while the main thread sleeps to simulate work. Learn about scheduling order and channel-based synchronization.

Learn how channels synchronize go routines, using make to create a chan of strings, and choose buffered or unbuffered modes to safely send and read data with the arrow operator.

Explore how to use a select statement to multiplex goroutines and implement timeouts in Go, using a done channel, time.After, and a 500 millisecond limit to finish or time out.

Create a job queue using go concurrency primitives by launching multiple workers, using jobs and results channels, and a worker function to process 100 jobs concurrently.