Introducing Go

Chapter 11. Next Steps

You now have all the information necessary to write most Go programs. However, there are still some nuances and advanced techniques you must learn—programming is as much a craft as it is just having knowledge. This chapter will provide you with some suggestions about how best to master the craft of programming.

Study the Masters

Part of becoming a good artist or writer is studying the works of the masters. It’s no different with programming. One of the best ways to become a skilled programmer is to study the source code produced by others. Go is well suited to this task because the source code for the entire project is freely available.

For example, we might take a look at the source code to the io/ioutil library available at golang.org/src/pkg/io/ioutil/ioutil.go.

Read the code slowly and deliberately. Try to understand every line and take a look at the supplied comments. For example, in the ReadFile method, there’s a comment that says this:

// It's a good but not certain bet that FileInfo
// will tell us exactly how much to read, so
// let's try it but be prepared for the answer
// to be wrong.

This method probably started out simpler than what it became, so this is a great example of how programs can evolve after testing and why it’s important to supply comments with those changes. The source code for all of the packages is available at golang.org/src/pkg/.

Make Something

One of the best ways to hone your skills is to practice coding. There are ...