Cloud Native Go, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Go Language Foundations

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.¹

Alan Perlis, ACM SIGPLAN Notices (September 1982)

No programming book would be complete without at least a brief refresher of its language of choice, so here we are!

This chapter will differ slightly from the ones in more introductory-level books, however, in that we’re assuming that you’re at least familiar with common coding paradigms but may or may not be a little rusty with the finer points of Go syntax. As such, this chapter will focus as much on Go’s nuances and subtleties as its fundamentals. For a deeper dive into the latter, I recommend either Learning Go by Jon Bodner (O’Reilly) or The Go Programming Language by Alan A. A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan (Addison-Wesley Professional).

If you’re relatively new to the language, you’ll definitely want to read on. Even if you’re somewhat comfortable with Go, you might want to skim this chapter: there will be a gem or two in here for you. If you’re a seasoned veteran of the language, you can go ahead and move on to Chapter 4 (or read it ironically and judge me).

Basic Data Types

Go’s basic data types, the fundamental building blocks from which more complex types are constructed, can be divided into three subcategories:

• Booleans that contain only one bit of information—true or false—representing some logical conclusion or state.

• Numeric types that represent simple—variously sized floating point ...