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The "Go.dev Overview" Lesson is part of the full, Basics of Go course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:
Maximiliano guides students through the official Go website and explains the organization of its documentation. The discussion includes a brief demonstration of the Tour of Go tutorial and an overview of the learning resources available.
Transcript from the "Go.dev Overview" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> So the website today, let me get out of the slides for a minute, it's not Golang anymore, it's go.dev. So around six, seven years ago, Google has acquired the generic top-level domain gtld.dev that you can buy. In fact, my personal website is also third.dev so you can actually buy a .dev domain.
[00:00:26]
A lot of languages and frameworks, they moved their .com or .org websites into .dev. When that happened, we lost the lang on Go. So five years ago, around five years ago, now we have go.dev, we don't need to actually use Golang anymore, even if you're making searches about the language.
[00:00:50]
So I mean if you try even to, Use ChatGTP or Google Bard to ask questions about Go there is no problem with that, when you say Go, it knows what you're talking about not, it's not the old Go language. Okay, makes sense? So now we know that the website is go.dev here you will find all the documentation.
[00:01:12]
So let me go quickly about some important things. The documentation, I can say, it has three important sections on the dark side. So when you go to docs there we have effective Go that I think is pretty cool, effective Go and my job and that in the new tab.
[00:01:32]
It's a way that you have you can start with introduction, okay, and it has all the information. It's well written as some kind of fun ebook. I think it's good. So if you try that it's good. The user manual, on the other hand, is kind of mean that's a personal opinion.
[00:01:50]
But sometimes it's not really well written or is really techie, or too geeky to actually if you're not actually part of the team, writing the language, you're done, get exactly what's going on there. And then the standard libraries is okay, I mean, can be better, but it's okay.
[00:02:11]
We will actually list all the, I don't wanna say technical terms yet, but let's say for now all the objects available. It's a wrong term, but anyway all the abilities available in Go and all the functions, properties and methods that we have on each part so you get each standard library.
[00:02:30]
You can pick the library for example and increase the font size a little bit, we have a library for manipulating HTML, for example for the operating system. And when you get there, you have an overview, and you have the list of variables, functions, and types. So this is complete.
[00:02:48]
So it's good. But when you're learning, for the first time, it's kind of overwhelming if you actually get into that. That's why we have on the Learn curve of the website, here you can download the latest version of Go, by the way you can start downloading it. When you go to download, you can download the one for your version.
[00:03:14]
Have in mind if you are on a Mac, be careful to pick the right one, so it can be the old Intel Max, if you have a, let's not say old, but the previous MacBook, MacBook villa or Mac Mini, if it's Intel, you download this one. If you're having the Apple chip, the M1 or M2, you need to download the ARM 64 version.
[00:03:38]
If not, it's not gonna work. So if you download the Intel, even if Apple has a compatibility layer that will actually run Intel app for Go because it's a compiler and this is some special things from the US, it won't work properly. So you need to download the other one.
[00:03:56]
Okay, well Linux and Windows are the ones you have here. And the latest version that we have today is 1.20. We'll talk about versions in a minute in terms of stability and how frequent do we get updates and if that's a problem or not. So we will get there.
[00:04:16]
But I wanna go back to Learn. When you get into Learn I wanna emphasize this section, I think it's pretty cool for those of you learning Go from scratch. Of course we are here today doing this workshop during this course so you don't need to go over the tour of go but if you wanna play with that later, you can take a tour.
[00:04:37]
Actually, it's a step-by-step process with an online text editor where you can play with this. So you can change that. And you can run it locally without downloading anything. So actually, this is using a cloud compiler. But anyway for learning the basics, and also you have a menu so you can go directly to talking about generics or structs.
[00:05:05]
We don't know what those are yet. But then we see the code and we can try, we can change. You can edit the code so you can play with it. It's a playground. So, it's actually pretty cool and it's well organized, and it Go wise. Probably 100% of the language because as I mentioned before, Go is it simple language.
[00:05:28]
It's small compared with other languages. Okay, so the three of go I think it's pretty cool. It's a good idea for those of you to Go over the whole door after after the course to see if you got all the ideas, for example. Okay, make sense? Finally, you have the full documentation, that's the one that, yeah, I mean, there are tutorials, but sometimes I feel that's my personal opinion.
[00:05:56]
They can improve how it's written. So if you're new to Go, if you're new to the ecosystem, or even if you're not yet working in the development space, it might be still weird to read some of those articles, because they're really hard. They're talking to someone with lot of experience, okay?
[00:06:18]
So, but the tour of Go is, is cool, so go ahead with that one.
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