Notes and code sampesl for the first meeting of the Squaremouth book club. Covering Chapters 1 - 5 of the go lang book.

Nothing of note in this chapter.

Finally get to a "Hello World". Briefly explains packages ("main"), importing, and main. Some of the simplest types are broken down.

Starts of by explaining types in terms of philosophers and mathematics (man after my own heart).

• uint8, uint16, uint32, uint64,int8,int16,int32,int64
• Alias types: byte == uint8 and rune == int32
• Machine specific: uint, int, uintpr

• float32 and float64 (increase in precision with bits).
• NaN
• ∞ - (OPTION + 5)
• complex64 and complex128

• Can be created with "" - Single line strings that allow escape characters
• Can be created with `` - Multi-line strings but no escape characters
• len("String") - String length
• "Sample"[0] - String indexing, does not return what you'd expect

• true, false - literals
• &&, ||, ! - operations

Now we start looking at how we can declare variables in go. There are a few different ways to do the same thing.

• var x int = 8 - declaring and assigning in one line
• var x int - only declaring followed by x = 18 later on
• x := 8 - assigning and inferring the type
• const stuff string - Declaring a constant variable, can't be re-assigned

Can almost write a useful program now.

All loops are written in terms of for

• for stuff == true { ... } - While loop equivalent
• for i := 1; i <= 5; i += 2 { ... } - Traditional for-loop
• Yet to be seen for-each style loop

Standard conditionals using real english words.

• if, else if, else - Main conditional statements
• switch statement also exists

• Capital lettered function/method names. ex)

  fmt.Println("Hello World")

• The go tool and the godoc command. Run go help to see what it can do.

• Go has a metric ton of types. Is this worth it?

• You can use UTF-8 characters, think about that. Show gomega.

• Go will not allow you to declare variables that aren't used (_ values)