Introduction - Getting Started with Go

Go, or Golang, is a programming language created by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google. It is a statically typed and compiled language. The language was initially designed in 2007. That means it is in a pretty early stage. Even though the language is new, it doesn’t compromise its features. Go is fast, stable, scalable, and robust. The primary purpose of designing Go was to replace traditional high-performance languages like Java or C++. According to the StackOverflow developer survey 2022, Go is one of the most popular programming languages — it is more popular than Rust!

This tutorial series aims to help you get started as quickly as possible with Go. In this series, you’ll learn the basics of Go, including data types, variables, functions, loops, etc. And ultimately, you’ll build a simple CRUD API in Golang using a gin package.

But before jumping into the tutorial series, let’s understand why you should learn or use Go.

Speed: One of the primary focuses behind building Go was making it a fast programming language. Go is a compiled language rather than an interpreted language. A compiled language translates the source code to machine code directly, whereas an interpreted language uses a tool or interpreter that reads and executes the code. Because Go is a compiled language, the execution speed is much faster. Another reason behind the speed of Go is it is statically typed. You can compare the speed of Go with most of the popular programming languages from here.

Simplicity: As developers, we need to update and upgrade ourselves constantly. A new JavaScript framework comes every week; a new programming language emerges every month! To keep up with the latest technologies, the technologies need to have a more straightforward learning curve. You can get started with Go pretty quickly if you are already familiar with any one programming language.Support: Most of the popular IDEs and editors support Go. The Go community is also very active. You can reach out to the Go Slack or Discord server anytime you need help.

Support: Most of the popular IDEs and editors support Go. The Go community is also very active. You can reach out to the Go Slack or Discord server anytime you need help.

Now that we have some reason for using Go let's move on to learning the basics of the language in the next part. Also, if you want to read more about why Go is great, you can check out this Stackoverflow blog post.

Every week, I'll be adding a new article to this series. Until then, here are some tasks for you: - Join the Go discord server - Do a basic search about the basic datatypes in Go

See ya! 👋