First appeared in November 2009, Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google. You might have just heard about this programming language in the past couple of years but recently, Go has started to gain significant popularity in the coding world.
Being light-weight, open source, and suited for today’s microservices architectures, Go is an amazing choice for a language. Also known as Google’s Golang, this language was developed by some of the brilliant minds from Google who created the C programming language. Today, it is one of the fastest growing languages and it’s absolutely a great time to start learning and working with GO.
Advantages Of Go
Memory management is one such thing that requires different routines for different processing cores. Attempting to account for each configuration manually, one might end up increasing the risk memory leaks. Many programmers at first think that memory management is being done for them. However, that is not true. And this is where Go come into the play. As an explicitly engineered programming language, Go benefits developers in several ways that include garbage collection, native concurrency, and other native capabilities and reduces the developers’ work of writing code to handle memory leaks or networked apps.
Furthermore, Golang is also gaining ground in the space of data science because it has the qualities and the abilities — good error handling and easier debugging — and also, as data scientists are typically not programmers, Go helps them to go from their laptop to full production phase.
Tips To Follow For Learning Go
So lately, if you have planned to learn GO, then here are some of the things you need to keep in mind and are valuable in your Golang journey.
Have An Upper Hand On The Basics
It always easy to start a venture but difficult to keep it going and it is same with learning GO. Most of the programming enthusiasts fail at some point because they skip fundamentals. So, if you have started your journey of Golang then you should drop the mindset of “who has time to read the basics”. It is advised not to skip any fundamental — having a strong hand on the basics are always considered to be a good practice.
When you opt to learn a programming language, always make sure you are following their documents and Go has a very readable language spec that was clearly written to be read and understood. Go to A Tour Of Go for all the necessary details, or you can also visit The Go Programming Language Specification.
Let The Best Guide You
The internet is loaded with numerous resources that you can use to learn Go. However, not every resource is reliable, so it is advised to learn from the best. It is good if you spend some of your time to swim through the internet to find some of the best resources that you can use to take your Go knowledge to next level.
Some of the best online platform to learn Go are:
- Learn-golang.org: As mentioned before, it is always good to learn from the creator. learn-golang.org teaches makes your foundation strong — it has a coding window where one can code and test.
- Udemy’s The Complete Developer’s Guide (Golang): This course at Udemy has a 4.6-star rating with 23,567 students enrolled. Created by an engineering architect, Stephen Grider, this course teaches you are designed in such a way one can get you up and run as fast as possible with Go.
- GopherCon: It is one of the popular conferences on Golang. With experienced personalities from the Golang space, GopherCon is a great platform to learn things about Go. In case if you fail to attend the conference, then the videos are available online — GopherCon Academy.
Wrapping Up: Get Up And Code
“Practice makes a man perfect,” and this is without a doubt the best tip. No matter how much you learn or study, you can never master a programming language until and unless you practice it. Start with the basic Go codes and move on to the advanced level. Also, give a try on bug hunting — finding a bug on a code will not only make your code better but also make your analysing perfect.Furthermore, if you don’t are confused with which framework to use when you are just starting, then Gofmt is definitely the tool you should go for. Why? Because it is built into the language runtime and automatically formats Go source code. Talking about frameworks, here is a list of some of the best frameworks you can use: Revel, Beego, Gin Gonic and Buffalo.