Go Basics Guide 🏆

Practical Go programming guide covering the basics and some advanced topics. This guide is designed to help you quickly get started with Go and understand its core concepts.

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1. Hello World

• Print "Hello World!"

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2. Variables

• Declare and Initialize Variables
• Data Types
• Constants
• Printing Variables
• iota and Enumerated Constants

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3. Basic Functions

• Declare Functions
• Function Parameters and Return Values
• Naked Returns
• Use Functions Across Files (Same Package)

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4. Operators

• Arithmetic Operators
• Comparison Operators
• Logical Operators
• Bitwise Operators
• Assignment Operators
• Increment/Decrement Operators

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5. Conditionals

• if / else Statements
• switch Statements
• switch true Pattern (Conditional Cases)

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6. Loops

• Basic for Loops
• Range Loops (for range)
• Simulate while Loops
• Infinite Loops
• break and continue
• Loop Labels
• goto Statement

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7. String Manipulation

• Common String Functions (strings package)
• String Formatting
• Type Conversion (String ↔ Number) (strconv package)
• Regular Expressions (regexp)
• Iterating Over Bytes and Runes
• Byte Slice Manipulation (bytes package)

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8. Arrays and Slices

• Arrays and Fixed-Length Arrays
• Size Inference with [...]T
• Slices and Slice Literals
• Iteration with range
• Copying and Appending Slices
• slices Package Functions (note: you should use slices instead of sort)
• unique Package Functions

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9. Maps

• Declare and Initialize Maps
• Map Literals
• Access and Modify Keys
• Iterate Over Maps
• Delete Keys from Map (delete() function)
• Comma-ok Idiom
• maps Package Functions

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10. Advanced Functions

• Function Values (First-Class Functions)
• Assign Functions to Variables
• Pass Functions as Parameters
• Return Functions from Functions
• Anonymous Functions
• Closures
• Variadic Functions (...T)
• Recursive Functions

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11. Pointers

• Declare and Use Pointers (*T)
• Get the Address of a Variable (&)
• Dereference a Pointer (*p)
• Modify Values Through Pointers
• Handle Nil Pointers Safely
• Allocate Memory with new()

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12. Structs

• Declare Struct Types
• Access and Modify Struct Fields
• Use Pointers to Structs
• Anonymous Structs
• Nested Structs
• Struct Methods with Receivers

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13. Error Handling

• Return and Handle error Values
• Must Idiom (Short-Circuit Failures)
• Use panic, recover, and defer
• Define Custom Error Types
• Wrap Errors with %w and errors.New
• Use errors.Is and errors.As

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14. Interfaces

• Declare Interfaces
• Implicit Interface Implementation
• Empty Interface (interface{})
• Type Assertions, Type Switches, and Comma-ok Idiom
• Type Aliases
• Built-in Interfaces: error, Stringer, etc.
• "Explicit" Interface Implementation

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15. Packages

• Create Custom Packages
• Import Packages
• Package Visibility and Capitalization Rules
• init() Function

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16. Generics

• Generic Function Syntax
• Define Generic Struct Types
• Type Constraints: any, comparable, ~T
• Union Types and Type Sets
• Generics with Interfaces
• Type Aliases with Generics
• cmp Package Functions

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17. Concurrency

• Goroutines (go Keyword)
• Channels (Buffered and Unbuffered, Comma-ok Idiom, Direction Types, Iteration)
• select Statement
• sync.WaitGroup for Goroutine Synchronization
• sync.Mutex for Mutual Exclusion
• context Package (Timeouts, Cancellation, Passing Values)

18. Input and Output

• io package (Readers, Writers, Copying)
• File Operations (os package)
• Stdin, Stdout
• HTTP Requests (net/http package)
• bufio package (Buffered I/O, Scanner, Reader, Writer)

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19. Data Serialization

• JSON (encoding/json package) and Encoder examples
• XML (encoding/xml package)
• CSV (encoding/csv package)

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20. Advanced Concurrency

• io.Pipe for In-Memory Streaming
• sync Package
  • RWMutexes - Read/Write Locks
  • Once
  • Pool
  • Cond
  • Atomic Operations (sync/atomic Package)
• Deadlocks, Race Conditions (-race flag), and Goroutine Leaks
• Concurrency Patterns
  • Fan-out, Fan-in
  • Generator
  • Pipeline
  • Worker Pool
  • Semaphore

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21. Encoding

• Base64 (encoding/base64 package)
• Base32 (encoding/base32 package)
• Hexadecimal (encoding/hex package)

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22. Compression

• Gzip (compress/gzip package)
• Zlib (compress/zlib package)
• Flate (compress/flate package)

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23. Cryptography

TODO:

24. Reflection & Schema Validation
25. Testing, Benchmarking and testify
26. HTTP Requests and HTTP Clients
27. HTTP Server, HTMX, Logging, and Environment Variables
28. Networking - TCP and UDP
29. Websockets
30. gRPC and Protobufs
31. Databases - SQL, NoSQL, and ORM
32. Built-in advanced data structures - Heap, Linked List, and Ring
33. C and Assembly in Go