Go Cookbook

Chapter 1. Getting Started Recipes

1.0 Introduction

Let’s start easy first. In this chapter, you’ll go through the essential recipes to begin coding in Go, installing Go, and then writing some simple Go code. You will go through the fundamentals, from using external libraries and handling errors to simple testing and logging events. Some of these recipes are intentionally concise—more detail about them in later chapters. If you’re already familiar with the basics of Go, you can skip this chapter altogether.

1.1 Installing Go

Problem

You want to install Go and prepare the environment for Go development.

Solution

Go to the Go website and download the latest, greatest version of Go. Then follow the installation instructions to install Go.

Discussion

First, you need to go to the Go download site. You can choose the correct version according to your operating system and hardware and download the right package.

There are a couple of ways to install Go—you can either install the prebuilt binaries for your platform or compile it from the source. Most of the time, there is no need to compile it from the source unless you can’t find the appropriate prebuilt binaries for your operating system. Even then, you can usually use your operating system’s package manager to install Go instead.

MacOS

Open the downloaded package file and follow the prompts to install. Go will be installed at /usr/local/go, and your PATH environment variable should also have /usr/local/go/bin added to it. ...