2 Diving Into Go

You paid money for a book called Go In Action, so let’s see some code already! Rather than just throw a bunch of reference material at you (there are plenty of other great books for that!), we thought we might try something a little more hands-on instead. This chapter will walk you through the creation of a single piece of software that mirrors a real-world utility, touching on various language features and fundamentals along the way.

Go is more than just a language and a compiler, it’s an entire ecosystem of tools designed to help you format your code, manage dependencies, test and research documentation, and, rather than gloss over these tools until later, we believe you should get your hands dirty with them as soon as possible, so that you can have a more well-rounded foundation as a Go programmer.

So let’s get to it!

2.1 Goal: A Program To Count Words

If there’s one thing computers are good at, it’s counting things really, really quickly, which makes these tasks ripe for automation with the sort of elegant code programmers thirst for. A very common things for programmers to count are lines and words in text files, mainly because this is the quickest way to show off how many lines of code (or "loc" if you’re cool) you’ve written, so that other programmers will be jealous of how productive you are.

2.2 What You Need First

2.2.1 A Code Editor

2.2.2 Git

2.2.3 The Go Toolchain

2.2.4 Terminal Access

2.3 Creating Your Project Root

2.3.1 Initializing The Project Module

2.4 The First Iteration: Counting Spaces

2.4.1 Creating main.go

2.4.2 Building The Program With go build

2.4.3 Runing The Program With go run

2.4.4 Formatting Your Code With gofmt

2.4.5 Package Declarations

2.4.6 Import Declarations

2.4.7 Blocks and Scope

2.4.8 Variable Declaration

2.4.9 Comments

2.4.10 Basic For Loops

2.4.11 Calling Functions In Other Packages

2.5 A Better Way To Split The String