Advanced Go Training

Day One

Welcome To Go Training: Meet Your Instructor And Get Started

In this introductory module, you’ll be introduced to your instructor and the course materials that will guide you through the Go training. You'll find contact details for your instructor, access to the course content, and instructions on setting up your development environment. We'll ensure you’re prepared for a smooth learning experience, with access to all course updates and materials for life. Additionally, you’ll learn how to access further resources and support. Before diving in, we encourage everyone to introduce themselves and share their goals for the course.

Automating Testing In Go: Using Go Test And Integrating With Continuous Integration Pipelines

Automating testing is crucial for maintaining code quality and reducing bugs during the development process. This chapter will teach you how to efficiently run and automate tests in Go using the go test command, alongside various useful options such as running specific tests, enabling verbose outputs, handling race conditions, and running tests in parallel. Additionally, you’ll learn how to incorporate tests into Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for robust and automated feedback on your codebase. By the end, you’ll understand how to structure your tests for fast and effective validation.

Boosting Code Coverage: Tools And Techniques For Comprehensive Testing In Go

This chapter explores advanced tools and techniques for increasing your test coverage and improving overall code quality. You will learn how to generate code coverage reports, interpret coverage statistics, and utilize heatmaps to identify untested code. Additionally, we'll cover isolating specific tests, testing in parallel, and how to leverage Go’s built-in coverage tools to maximize testing efficiency. By the end of this chapter, you'll be equipped to improve your Go project's coverage and maintain high testing standards.

Break

Tea/Coffee Break.

Example Tests

No project is complete without great documentation. Example tests are a great way to not only document your code, but ensure that the examples you use always work as they are actually a test in addition to the documentation.

Isolating Dependencies In Go Tests: Techniques For Creating Reliable Stubs And Fakes

In Go, decoupling components and isolating dependencies during testing can be easily achieved using interfaces. This chapter explores how to create stubs and fakes to test functionality independently and ensure reliability without the need for external dependencies. By simulating different behaviors in your components, you can improve test accuracy and efficiency. You'll learn how to replace real implementations with stubs in unit tests, handle various scenarios like errors and success cases, and maintain high test coverage. With these techniques, you can create more maintainable and flexible test suites for your Go applications.

Testing HTTP Handlers With Net/HTTP: Writing Tests For HTTP Services And Utilizing The Net/http/httptest Package

In this chapter, we dive into testing HTTP handlers in Go, leveraging the net/http/httptest package. Testing HTTP handlers can be approached in two distinct styles: Unit Style Testing and Integration Style Testing. Each style serves different purposes in ensuring that your web applications work as expected. We will explore both approaches, demonstrating how to mock HTTP requests, simulate responses, and write efficient tests for your web services. Additionally, you'll learn how to create test servers, utilize middleware, and handle request bodies and form data. By the end of this module, you’ll have the skills to write comprehensive and reliable tests for Go-based web applications.

Day Two

Testing Asynchronous And Concurrent Code: Techniques For Reliable And Efficient Testing

Testing asynchronous and concurrent code introduces unique challenges, such as dealing with unknown execution times and ensuring test reliability in multi-threaded environments. This chapter focuses on how to efficiently test asynchronous operations, such as database writes, service queues, and distributed system calls, using Go's concurrency primitives like goroutines and channels.

We will cover key techniques for handling these complexities in your tests, including timeouts, retries, and using channels to synchronize test execution. By the end of this chapter, you'll know how to design tests that effectively handle non-blocking, asynchronous processes while maintaining test stability and minimizing bloated test durations. This chapter assumes familiarity with basic concurrency concepts in Go, including the httptest package, channels, and goroutines.

Enhancing Go Testing With Advanced Tooling

This chapter introduces advanced tools and techniques to improve testing in Go. It covers topics such as:

• Comparing Complex Structures: A deeper look into comparing values in Go, going beyond reflect.DeepEqual, which often leads to unexpected results, and exploring better alternatives like go-cmp.

• Using the testing/quick Package: This section explains how to automate tests for a wide variety of input scenarios by leveraging the testing/quick package, which allows for rapid generation of test cases with minimal setup.

• Fuzz Testing: The chapter also introduces fuzzing as a way to discover edge cases and vulnerabilities in your API. It highlights tools and methods for integrating fuzz testing into your testing strategy to improve code reliability and security.

This chapter provides detailed insights into best practices for using Go’s tooling ecosystem for more effective and comprehensive testing.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automation can significantly improve developer productivity. This chapter will show how to implement some very simple, lightweight automation to automatically run tests and coverage.

Break

Tea/Coffee Break.

Handling IO In Go Tests: Effective Techniques For Testing IO Operations And External System Interactions

Handling input/output (IO) operations is a crucial part of many software applications, especially when interacting with files, network connections, or other external systems. Testing such interactions presents unique challenges, such as dealing with external dependencies, ensuring proper data flow, and maintaining test isolation.

In this chapter, we will explore how to design Go programs to be easily testable without creating actual files or relying on real external systems. We’ll focus on using Go's io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces to abstract away IO operations, making tests faster, more reliable, and more isolated. Additionally, we’ll explore common patterns, utility types, and functions from Go's standard library to streamline testing for IO-heavy code.

By the end of this chapter, you will have a solid understanding of how to:

• Abstract IO operations using io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces.
• Test functions that involve reading and writing data to external systems like files or network connections.
• Use utility types like strings.Reader, bytes.Buffer, and io.MultiReader to simulate different IO scenarios.
• Apply advanced testing techniques with the testing/iotest package to ensure robustness in handling IO errors and edge cases.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is an essential tool in Go for evaluating the performance of your code. This chapter introduces you to the powerful tools Go provides for benchmarking and performance analysis, allowing you to measure the efficiency of your code with precision. You will learn how to establish baseline performance, write effective benchmarks, and compare results to see the impact of optimizations. This chapter also delves into common pitfalls in benchmarking and how to avoid them, ensuring that your performance tests yield reliable, consistent results. Finally, we will explore advanced topics such as tracking memory allocations, handling compiler optimizations, and using tools like benchstat to analyze and compare benchmark data. By the end of this chapter, you'll have a solid foundation for systematically improving the performance of your Go applications.

Day Three

Profiling Go Applications For Performance Optimization

Profiling is a critical aspect of performance tuning in software development. In this chapter, we dive deep into the various profiling tools that Go provides, focusing on how to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize code effectively. You will learn how to generate CPU, memory, block, mutex, and thread creation profiles, and how to use interactive tools like pprof to analyze these profiles. Additionally, the chapter covers advanced topics like generating profiles from live applications, using profiling in benchmarks, and visualizing performance data with tools such as flame graphs. By the end of this chapter, you'll have the knowledge to pinpoint inefficient code and make informed decisions on how to enhance the performance of your Go applications.

Optimizing Go Services For High Performance

In this chapter, we delve into the advanced techniques and best practices for optimizing Go services to achieve better performance and efficiency. While tools like pprof and benchmarks are essential, the real value comes from identifying and addressing common coding inefficiencies that impact runtime performance. This chapter equips you with the skills to fine-tune your Go code by spotting these pitfalls, leveraging compiler tricks, and minimizing resource usage without sacrificing code clarity.

Key Takeaways

• Learn to identify and remove unnecessary memory allocations.
• Understand how to buffer readers and writers to optimize I/O performance.
• Use flame graphs and other profiling tools to eliminate redundant operations.
• Recognize when and where to optimize without introducing unnecessary complexity.

Break

Tea/Coffee Break.

Tracing

The execution trace captures a wide range of execution events such as goroutine creation/blocking/unblocking, syscall enter/exit/block, GC-related events, changes of heap size, processor start/stop, etc. A precise nanosecond-precision timestamp and a stack trace is captured for most events. The generated trace can be interpreted using go tool trace.

This chapter will walk through how to enable tracing, use the trace tool, and spot performance issues.

Beyond The Classroom: Go Resources And Continued Learning

This chapter provides valuable resources to help you continue your journey with Go after the course. It includes links to official documentation, community support channels, recommended books, and video tutorials to deepen your understanding. Additionally, you’ll find ways to stay engaged with the Go developer community through Slack, mailing lists, and social media groups. We also introduce the Gopher Guides team, provide contact information for further training or consulting services, and share how to reach your instructors. Lastly, we encourage you to provide feedback to help us improve our offerings.

Optional Day

Concurrency Fundamentals In Go: Understanding Go's Approach To Concurrency With Goroutines

This chapter introduces Go's unique approach to concurrency, focusing on goroutines as lightweight, independent functions that enable efficient concurrent programming. You will explore how Go's concurrency model encourages communication through channels rather than shared memory, making code faster, more robust, and easier to scale. The chapter also covers the differences between concurrency and parallelism, the role of Go's scheduler, and how channels simplify communication between goroutines. Additionally, you’ll get a glimpse into the potential pitfalls of data races and Go’s powerful race detector.

Leveraging The Sync Package For Concurrency Control: Utilizing The Sync Package To Handle Complex Synchronization Problems

In this chapter, we will explore how Go’s sync package provides powerful tools to manage synchronization between goroutines, ensuring safe access to shared memory. You will learn how to utilize synchronization primitives like WaitGroups, Mutexes, and RWMutexes to coordinate concurrent operations effectively. Additionally, we will cover common concurrency issues such as race conditions, deadlocks, and bugs, and demonstrate how to debug them using Go's race detector and other tools. This chapter will equip you with the knowledge to handle complex concurrency problems, making your Go programs more robust and efficient.

Break

Tea/Coffee Break.

Concurrency With Channels: Safe Communication Between Goroutines

This chapter delves into Go's powerful concurrency mechanism using channels to enable safe communication between goroutines. You will learn how to implement basic and advanced channel usage, including buffered and unbuffered channels, how to signal completion, and gracefully shut down applications. The chapter will guide you through practical examples and best practices for avoiding common concurrency pitfalls, making it easier to build robust, concurrent applications that scale efficiently.

Understanding The Context Package: Managing Request-scoped Data, Deadlines, And Cancellation With The Context Package

The context package in Go is essential for managing request-scoped data, timeouts, and cancellations across various parts of your application. This chapter provides an in-depth look into how Go's context package helps simplify managing concurrent operations. You'll learn how to propagate values like user data across goroutines, handle timeouts to ensure efficient resource management, and gracefully cancel operations when required. By the end, you’ll understand how to avoid common pitfalls and implement the context package to build robust, scalable Go applications.

Prerequisites

Testing Basics: Writing And Running Unit Tests

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of testing in Go, with a focus on writing and running unit tests using the built-in testing package. You'll learn how to structure tests, the importance of naming conventions, and how to utilize the *testing.T type to create effective test cases. Key concepts such as the difference between Error and Fatal, crafting meaningful failure messages, and organizing internal vs. external tests are explored. Additionally, we'll cover useful helper functions, alternative testing packages, and provide practical examples to help you develop reliable, maintainable tests for your Go applications.

Table-Driven Testing For Flexible And Scalable Tests

Table-driven testing is a powerful and efficient way to create clean, reusable, and scalable tests in Go. By defining test cases as data in tables, you can minimize duplication and easily extend test coverage by adding new cases. This chapter covers how to implement table-driven tests, demonstrating how to isolate test logic, reduce redundancy, and ensure your tests remain organized. You will also learn advanced techniques like running sub-tests, parallelizing table-driven tests, and handling setup and teardown logic for enhanced performance and clarity

Interfaces And Polymorphism In Go: Understanding Go’s Approach To Interfaces And Dynamic Behavior In Type Systems

Interfaces in Go provide a way to specify the behavior of an object: If something can do this, then it can be used here. This chapter will take a look at how to use interfaces to abstract that behavior. Concepts such as the Empty Interface, satisfying multiple interfaces, and asserting for behavior will be covered. Additionally, this chapter will cover the difference between value and pointer receivers and how they affect the ability to satisfy an interface.

Embedding And Composition For Code Reuse: Using Go’s Embedding Feature For Cleaner, More Modular Code

This chapter delves into Go's powerful embedding and composition mechanisms, which allow developers to build cleaner, modular, and reusable code without traditional inheritance. Instead of subclassing, Go enables embedding types within structs and interfaces, promoting fields and methods automatically. You will explore how embedding works, how method promotion simplifies code, and how to handle collisions and method overriding effectively. This chapter also covers how embedding can be used to satisfy interfaces, making your code more versatile and maintainable through practical examples.

Error Handling And Best Practices (Dealing With Errors, Panics, Recover)

Go's approach to error handling is simple but powerful, emphasizing clear control flow over error-prone constructs like try/catch. In this chapter, you will learn how to effectively manage errors in Go using idiomatic patterns. The chapter covers basic error handling, creating and returning errors, and best practices such as wrapping errors for better context. You will also explore advanced topics like custom error types, sentinel errors, and the use of Go's panic and recover for managing unexpected failures. By the end, you'll have a deep understanding of how Go’s error model leads to more reliable and maintainable code, while learning when and how to use recovery mechanisms for graceful error handling.