Learning Go - a free E-Book for learning the Go language.

The book currently consists of the following chapters:

1. Introduction: Show how to install Go and details the lineage of the language Go.
2. Basics: Types, variables and control structures.
3. Functions: How to make and use functions.
4. Packages: Functions and data is grouped together in packages. Here you will see how to make your own package. How to unit test your package is also described.
5. Beyond the basics: Learn how to create your own data types and define function on them (called methods in Go).
6. Interfaces: Go does not support Object Orientation in the traditional sense. In Go the central concept is interfaces.
7. Concurrency: With the go keyword function can be started in separate routines (called goroutines). Communication with those goroutines is done via channels.
8. Communication : How to create/read/write from and to files. And how to do networking.

Each chapter concludes with a number of exercises with answers to help you to get some handson experience. Currently it has more than 30 exercises.

• See http://www.golang.org for the homepage of Go.
• [Learning Go Project page.] 2

Building the book

Package Prerequisites

When building this book from LaTeX sources you will need the following packages on Ubuntu (tested on 12.04).

• inkscape
• gnumeric
• ttf-droid
• ttf-dejavu
• ttf-sazanami-gothic (Japanese font)
• ttf-arphic-ukai
• texlive-fonts-recommended
• texlive-extra-utils
• texlive-xetex
• texlive-latex-extra
• texlive-latex-recommended
• latex-cjk-xcjk (Chinese font)
• git-core
• GNU make

Following is a shell script to automate the package prerequisites installation.

You can copy and paste the following code to your vt100 session to kickoff the chains of many packages installation.

# tested on Ubuntu 12.04
for i in inkscape \
gnumeric \
ttf-droid \
ttf-dejavu \
ttf-sazanami-gothic \
ttf-arphic-ukai \
texlive-fonts-recommended \
texlive-extra-utils \
texlive-xetex \
texlive-latex-extra \
texlive-latex-recommended \
latex-cjk-xcjk \
git-core \
make \
do 
sudo apt-get install $i -y
done

Checking out the Learning Go LaTeX sources.

Using http protocol.

me@ubuntu1204:~$git clone https://github.com/miekg/gobook.git 
Cloning into 'gobook'...
remote: Counting objects: 4515, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1385/1385), done.
remote: Total 4515 (delta 3106), reused 4512 (delta 3104)
Receiving objects: 100% (4515/4515), 1.53 MiB | 1.17 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3106/3106), done.
me@ubuntu1204:~$

Using git protocol if you already have github account setup.

git clone git@github.com:tjyang/gobook.git

Make the Learning Go Book

make

Download the prebuilt Learning Go book

Latest prebuilt pdf book [can be downloaded from http://www.miek.nl/files/go/] 1