Learn Go by Writing REST APIs

Abstract

In this hands-on workshop about getting started with the Go programming language. Learning will be done by writing some REST APIs. This class is for people who would like to get started with Go and have some experience in programming.

Chapters

In Setup we'll make sure you have all that is needed to complete the workshop
We'll start by writing the customary "Hello World" program
- Program structure, import path, types
Now we can add some tests
- Testing, declarations, if statement
Next we'll add ping & time handlers
- HTTP protocol, REST overview
After that we'll set and get keys
- map, slicing, byte arrays, defer
Then we'll return all the keys
- slices, for loop, empty interface, JSON
We'll use gorilla/mux to simplify routing
- go get
Finally we'll support concurrency
- goroutines, locks, struct

Go Wild

The best way to learn a programming language is to find a problem and solve it using the language. If the problem is something that "itches" you - even better.

Here are some ideas on how to improve our web server:

Add a command line argument for the port to listen on
Support multiple databases
Instead of using a sync.Mutex to guard our data structure. Use a goroutine that will listen on a channel for commands and return result over a channel
Implement more commands, see redis commands for inspiration
Test everything
- Including running the server and calling it over HTTP
...

Examples

List of examples used in the lessons:

cond.go - Conditionals
defer.go - defer
empty-iface.go - The empty interface
for.go - For loops
goroutines.go - goroutines
json.go - JSON encoding
maps.go - maps
mux.go - gorilla/mux
slices.go - Slices
struct.go - Structs
vars.go - Variable declaration

References

License

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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