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Go is a powerful programming language renowned for its efficiency in developing command-line applications. It strikes an ideal balance between high performance, akin to C++ and Rust, and the simplicity of scripting languages like Python. Go's safety features, including strong typing and garbage collection, ensure reliable code. Its modern tooling, such as a decentralized package manager and robust test framework, enhances development ease. Additionally, Go simplifies advanced concepts like concurrency with its go keyword and offers an elegant generics implementation. The language boasts an extensive standard library, enabling developers to handle tasks from web server deployment to JSON processing without external dependencies.
Go's deployment flexibility is another asset, allowing cross-platform binary builds. Its widespread use in popular CLI tools like Docker and kubectl underscores its effectiveness. This course equips learners with skills from basic file operations and argument parsing to advanced topics like network requests and terminal UI design, making it ideal for mastering Go and building effective command-line applications.
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Go is one of the most popular programming languages out there for creating command line applications, and for good reason. The language itself sits in a kind of Goldilocks zone when it comes to programming languages. It has performance comparable to some of the fastest languages out there, such as C++ and Rust, yet provides a simplicity and speed to development similar to scripting languages such as Python.
As well as being fast, Go also happens to be incredibly safe, providing both strong typing and memory safety through the use of garbage collection. Additionally, Go is built for the modern era of software development, with many features catering towards an improved developer experience, such as its package manager, which is both decentralized and simple to use, or the built-in test framework, which also allows you to perform benchmark and fuzz testing.
As well as having great tooling, the language itself puts an emphasis on simplifying advanced features, such as concurrency, which can easily be achieved using the simple go keyword, or its implementation of generics, which feels rather elegant compared to other languages, even at the cost of not having as many features.
In the style of making things as easy to develop with as possible, the language also provides what is one of the most comprehensive standard libraries out there, enabling developers to achieve a lot of functionality without needing to reach for third-party dependencies. Using just the standard library, you can build and deploy a web server with advanced routing using the net/http package, handle file compression using the compress/gzip package, and both decode and encode JSON using the encoding/json package.
As well as making code easy to develop, Go also makes it simple to ship, providing the ability to build binaries using the go build command, which you can also target to different architectures and operating systems.
All of this makes Go a really powerful language for building command line applications. And you don't have to take my word for it. Some of the most used command line tools have been built using Go, such as Docker, Hugo, kubectl, and the GitHub CLI. Not only that, but Go also has some amazing packages for helping you build CLI applications, which can enable you to build text user interfaces that are not only powerful, but look great.
Okay, so perhaps now you're convinced, and you're ready to start building command line applications in Go. The next question you might have is how to get started. Fortunately, that's where this course comes in. This course is aimed at teaching you not just Go, but how to create great command line applications using it.
We cover topics ranging from the basics, such as reading from and writing to files, parsing command line arguments, and how to build and test your applications. But we don't just stop there, and later on we'll dive into some more advanced concepts, such as concurrency, sending requests over the network, and building great user interfaces for the terminal.
So if you're looking to level up your skills with Go, and want to learn how to create great command line applications whilst doing so, then this course is going to be perfect for you.