▶Book Description
System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS.
This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem, and familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP.
As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature-concurrency helping you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications.
By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go
▶What You Will Learn
- Explore concepts of system programming using Go and concurrency
- Gain insights into Golang's internals, memory models and allocation
- Familiarize yourself with the filesystem and IO streams in general
- Handle and control processes and daemons' lifetime via signals and pipes
- Communicate with other applications effectively using a network
- Use various encoding formats to serialize complex data structures
- Become well-versed in concurrency with channels, goroutines, and sync
- Use concurrency patterns to build robust and performant system applications
▶Key Features
- Learn how to write Unix and Linux system code in Golang v1.12
- Perform inter-process communication using pipes, message queues, shared memory, and semaphores
- Explore modern Go features such as goroutines and channels that facilitate systems programming
▶Who This Book Is For
If you are a developer who wants to learn system programming with Go, this book is for you. Although no knowledge of Unix and Linux system programming is necessary, intermediate knowledge of Go will help you understand the concepts covered in the book
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, An Introduction to System Programming, introduces you to Go and system programming and provides some basic concepts and an overview of Unix and its resources, including the kernel API. It also defines many concepts that are used throughout the rest of the book.
- Chapter 2, Unix OS Components, focuses on the Unix operating system and the components that you will interact with—files and the filesystem, processes, users and permissions, threads, and others. It also explains the various memory management techniques of the operating system, and how Unix handles resident and virtual memory.
- Chapter 3, An Overview of Go, takes a look at Go, starting with some history of the language and then explaining, one by one, all its basic concepts, starting with namespaces and the type system, variables, and flow control, and finishing with built-in functions and the concurrency model, while also offering an explanation of how Go interacts and manages its memory.
- Chapter 4, Working with the Filesystem, helps you to understand how the Unix filesystem works and how to master the Go standard library to handle file path operations, file reading, and file writing.
- Chapter 5, Handling Streams, helps you to learn about the interfaces for the input and output streams that Go uses to abstract data flows. It explains how they work and how to combine them and best use them without leaking information.
- Chapter 6, Building Pseudo-Terminals, helps you understand how a pseudo-terminal application works and how to create one. The result will be an interactive application that uses standard streams just as the command line does.
- Chapter 7, Handling Processes and Daemons, provides an explanation of what processes are and how to handle them in Go, how to start child processes from a Go application, and how to create a command-line application that will stay in the background (a daemon) and interact with it.
- Chapter 8, Exit Codes, Signals, and Pipes, discusses Unix inter-process communication. It explains how to use exit codes effectively. It shows you how signals are handled by default inside an application, and how to manage them with some patterns for effective signal handling. Furthermore, it explains how to connect the output and input of different processes using pipes.
- Chapter 9, Network Programming, explains how to use a network to make processes communicate. It explains how network communication protocols work. It initially focuses on low-level socket communication, such as TCP and UDP, before moving on to web server development using the well-known HTTP protocol. Finally, it shows how to use the Go template engine.
- Chapter 10, Data Encoding Using Go, explains how to leverage the Go standard library to encode complex data structures in order to facilitate process communications. It analyzes both text-based protocols, such as XML and JSON, and binary-based protocols, such as GOB.
- Chapter 11, Dealing with Channels and Goroutines, explains the basics of concurrency and channels and some general rules that prevent the creation of deadlocks and resourceleaking inside an application.
- Chapter 12, Synchronization with sync and atomic, discusses the synchronization packages of the sync and sync/atomic standard libraries, and how they can be used instead of channels to achieve concurrency easily. It also focuses on avoiding the leaking of resources and on recycling resources.
- Chapter 13, Coordination Using Context, discusses Context, a relatively new package introduced in Go that offers a simple way of handling asynchronous operations effectively.
- Chapter 14, Implementing Concurrency Patterns, uses the tools from the previous three chapters and demonstrates how to use and combine them to communicate effectively. It focuses on the most common patterns used in Go for concurrency.
- Chapter 15, Using Reflection, explains what reflection is and whether you should use it. It shows where it's used in the standard library and guides you in creating a practical example. It also shows how to avoid using reflection where there is no need to.
- Chapter 16, Using CGO, explains how CGO works and why and when you should use it. It explains how to use C code inside a Go application, and vice versa.
