Mihalis Tsoukalos - Go Systems Programming

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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First published: September 2017

Production reference: 1220917

ISBN 978-1-78712-564-3

www.packtpub.com

Mihalis Tsoukalos is a Unix administrator, programmer, DBA, and mathematician, who enjoys writing technical books and articles and learning new things. He has written more than 250 technical articles for many magazines including Sys Admin, MacTech, Linux Userand Developer, USENIX ;login:, Linux Format, and Linux Journal. His research interests include databases, operating systems, Statistics, and machine learning.

You can reach him at http://www.mtsoukalos.eu/ and @mactsouk.

Mihalis is also a photographer ( http://www.highiso.net/ ).

He is also the technical editor for MongoDB in Action, Second Edition, published by Manning.

Chris "mac" McEniry has been a practicing systems administrator and engineer for over twenty years. He regularly presents, writes tools, and works on improving how we maintain systems.

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Go Systems Programming is a book that will help you develop systems software using Go, which is a systems programming language that started as an internal Google project before becoming popular. What makes Go really popular is that it keeps the developer happy by being easy to write, easy to read, easy to understand, and by having a compiler that is there to help you. This book does not cover every possible aspect and feature of the Go programming language: only the ones that are related to systems programming. Should you wish to learn more about the Go programming language, you should wait from my next book, Mastering Go, which will be ready in 2018!

The book you are about to read is an honest book in the sense that it will present working Go code without overlooking its potential faults, its restrictions, and its logical gaffes, which will allow you to improve it on your own and create a better version of it in the future. What you will not be able to improve is the fundamental information that will be presented, which is the basis of the way Unix systems work. I will consider the book to be successful if it helps you understand what systems programming is about, why it is important, and how you can start developing systems software in Go. I will be equally happy if Go becomes your favorite programming language!

, Getting started with Go and Unix Systems Programming, starts by defining what systems programming is before talking about the advantages and the disadvantages of Go, the features of Go version 1.8, two handy Go tools named gofmt and godoc, as well as the various states of Unix processes.

, Writing Programs in Go