Golang Crash Course

Golang, which is created and maintained by Google, is one of the most powerful programming languages used to build cloud-native applications and distributed systems. The simplicity, concurrency model, and efficient runtime of the programming language make it a preferred choice for modern cloud and microservices.

The Golang Crash Course is a comprehensive and structured guide that covers all the necessary concepts to become a Golang expert, including concurrency, microservices architecture, and scalable API development. The book begins with the basics of Golang’s syntax, data structures, functions, and error handling. It then explores Golang’s powerful concurrency model using goroutines and channels, which helps readers design highly efficient parallel programs. In the final section, readers will learn how to build real-world microservices, develop REST APIs, secure services, deploy applications using Docker and Kubernetes, and finally manage data in distributed systems.

By the end of this book, readers will be able to design, build, secure, and deploy production-ready Golang applications. They will gain practical experience in building scalable backend services and cloud-native systems using modern development tools and best practices.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Understand Golang’s syntax, types, and language fundamentals.
● Building efficient programs using goroutines and channels.
● Designing scalable REST APIs and microservices in Golang.
● Organizing Golang applications using packages and modules.
● Securing services with authentication, TLS, and RBAC.
● Deploying Golang applications using Docker and Kubernetes.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is designed for engineering students, software developers, backend engineers, cloud engineers, and DevOps professionals who want to learn Golang for building modern and cloud-native distributed applications. It is suitable for beginners to intermediate developers who have basic programming knowledge in any languages like Java, Python, C, or C++.

1. Introduction to Go
2. Go Syntax and Language Fundamentals
3. Functions and Error Handling in Go
4. Structs and Methods
5. Arrays, Slices, and Maps
6. Pointers
7. Interfaces in Go
8. Packages and Modules
9. Introduction to Go Concurrency
10. Channels and Synchronization
11. Select Statements and Timers
12. Advanced Concurrency Patterns
13. Error Handling in Concurrency
14. Understanding Microservices Architecture
15. Building a Simple REST API in Go
16. Advanced RESTful API Design
17. Securing Microservices
18. Testing Microservices
19. Managing Data in Microservices
Appendix A: Go Tools and Resources
Appendix B: Glossary
Appendix C: Answers to Exercises

● Venkatesh R is a technology leader with more than 18 years of experience in AI, enterprise software engineering, cloud platforms and big data systems. He currently works as a lead architect (engineering director) at Visa, where he leads initiatives in data quality platforms, anomaly detection and advanced analytics systems. Over the course of his career, he has worked with organizations such as Walmart focusing on modernizing legacy architectures and building scalable cloud solutions.

He holds several professional certifications in AI, cloud and big-data technologies and is an MBA graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

● Shubham Raizada is a principal engineer at Atlassian, where he works on high-scale web applications and distributed systems. He holds a B.Tech in computer science from NITK Surathkal. Before Atlassian, he was at Walmart and Cohesity building data platforms and backend services with Golang, Kafka and Spark. He also spent time at Conviva building a streaming engine from scratch in Rust, that led to his open-source contributions to Apache OpenDAL.

In his free time, he likes to dive into technical papers and share what he learns on his blog.