Black Friday Sale!

Save 50% on Web Development with Go and Test with Go until Dec 3.

Both courses have lifetime access, a 30-day money back guarantee, and free updates. This is also the biggest discount I offer on the courses, and I only do it once a year around Black Friday.

Thank you for your continued support and happy coding!

Jon Calhoun

Recent Articles

Go Experience Report: Interfaces with Methods that Return Themselves

I want to describe a scenario where there currently isn’t a good solution in Go (at least that I am aware of). Let’s say you have something like the template.Template type with methods like Template.Funcs: type Template struct { *parse.Tree // contains filtered or unexported fields } func (t *Template) Funcs(funcMap FuncMap) *Template If we wanted to use an interface for this type, it is impossible to express in Go now.

Using the Service Object Pattern in Go

Developing a web application without separating the logic used to parse an incoming request from the actual application logic can be painful. It is hard to test your card, dependencies aren't clear, and the code can become a mess. Learn how to apply the service object pattern to your Go code in order to properly isolate these concerns, making it easier to test, maintain, and read your code.

Concatenating and Building Strings in Go 1.10+

Go 1.10 introduced the new strings.Builder type, which can be used to efficiently and easily build or concatenate strings. In this post we explore some of the ways to use the type as well as why it implementing the io.Writer interface makes it an incredibly powerful tool.

Exploring vgo

Yesterday Russ Cox announced vgo, a drop in replacement for the go tool designed to handle package versioning. While it is still an experiment, it is a pretty unexpected change given that everyone thought dep was going to become the official dependency management tool. If you haven’t already, you should start by reading Russ’ post as well as the tour he provides. It is a great overview of what vgo is, even if many people have misinterpreted a few things in the post.

When Should I Use One Liner if...else Statements in Go?

After using Go for a few weeks, chances are you are going to run across a single-line if...else statement. Most often, you will see this with an err (eg if err := doStuff(); err != nil { ... }). This article discusses the situations where a one-liner is appropriate, and ones where it isn't a great fit.

The New Website is Live

Gopher Image by Egon Elbre After quite a bit of time redoing my site, the new version is now ready for prime time. The new version is powered by Hugo, which is a static site genreator written in Go. It was previously powered by Ghost which is a little different, so if you see any dead links or anything like that let me know. Changing to Hugo allowed me to make quite a few changes that aren’t purely cosmetic.

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Popular Articles

6 Tips for Using Strings in Go

Learn how to perform common operations with strings in Go. This article discusses how to write multiline strings, concatenate strings efficiently, convert various data types into strings, checking for prefixes, and converting strings to byte slices.

Using Functions Inside Go Templates

Go's template package provides many useful built-in functions. Learn to use a few of the more common ones, as well as how to add custom fucntions to your templates so that you can add any functionality you need.

Connecting to a PostgreSQL database with Go's database/sql package

This tutorial explains how to connect to a Postgres DB using the database/sql and lib/pq packages. It also covers potential errors and solutions.

Creating Random Strings in Go

A tutorial explaining how to create a custom rand package with functions for creating random strings of varying length with custom of preset character sets.

Inserting records into a PostgreSQL database with Go's database/sql package

Learn to insert new records into a Postgres database using Go's database/sql package, along with how to get the resulting ID of newly created records.

How to use slice capacity and length in Go

Learn about the difference between capacity and length and how to properly utilize them to make your Go code faster, cleaner, and memory efficient.

Using PostgreSQL with Go

PostgreSQL is an open source relational database system that has been around for well over a decade and has proven to be a great all around storage choice when developing a web application.

In this series we are going to walk through everything from first installing PostgreSQL 9.5 all the way to using it with a Go application. While this post will cover all of the basics required to get started using SQL with Golang, it is not a full course on SQL. It is instead intended to guide you by giving you enough information to be productive, while not overloading you with details that can be learned as you progress.

In this series we will cover topics like:

Installing PostgreSQL on various operating systems (Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS, etc)
Interacting with a PostgreSQL database using raw SQL. This includes querying, inserting, updating, and deleting records.
Interacting with a PostgreSQL database using the database/sql package provided by Go's standard library. Again, this includes querying, inserting, updating, and deleting records.
Using ORMs and other third party librarys to interact with SQL databases

It's SQL Time

Let's Learn Algorithms

This series is no longer being updated. Instead, check out the course I created based on it - Algorithms with Go

Algorithms are a core component in a computer science education, and when taught properly they can help a developer improve his or her skills massively. In this series we will work to both understand how common computer algorithms work, as well as how to properly code each of them in Go.

By coding each algorithm as we learn it, you will develop the skills necessary to translate a conceptual idea into correct and efficient code. While many developers will know how to solve a problem set before them, oftentimes bugs and issues can stem from minor mistakes that algorithm practice can help remedy.

In addition to coding each algorithm we will also discuss how it works as well as the efficiency of each algorithm. That is, we will discuss how fast or slow the code will be based on the size of the input. This is important because in many real world situations you can opt for simpler - but slower - code if you know your inputs won't be too large. Alternatively, you could determine that the simpler solution won't work for your inputs and know that you will need to spend some extra time on a more efficient algorithm.

If you are relatively new to programmer, or simply don't have a formal computer science education, I invite you to check out these articles. You won't be disappointed!

Let's Learn Algorithms

Articles and Tutorials by

Jon Calhoun

Follow @joncalhoun

Jon Calhoun is a full stack web developer who teaches about Go, web development, algorithms, and anything programming. If you haven't already, you should totally check out his Go courses.

Previously, Jon worked at several statups including co-founding EasyPost, a shipping API used by several fortune 500 companies. Prior to that Jon worked at Google, competed at world finals in programming competitions, and has been programming since he was a child.

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