Go Programming Course - 6 Week Curriculum

This repository contains the code and materials from a comprehensive 6-month Go programming course that I taught to students interested in learning the Go language. As the instructor, I designed a curriculum that progressed from basic programming concepts to advanced web application development, guiding students through hands-on exercises and projects.

Course Structure

Week 1: Go Fundamentals

• Basic data types: booleans, integers, and floats
• Variable declaration and initialization (var vs :=)
• Constants
• Composite types: arrays, slices, and maps
• Working with slices: append, make, capacity
• Structs and anonymous structs
• Control flow: if statements, conditionals

Week 2: Functions, Pointers, and Methods

• Command-line arguments
• Formatting and printing with the fmt package
• Functions: declarations, parameters, and return values
• Pointers and memory management
• Methods and receiver functions
• Interfaces and type implementations
• Home assignment: Building a book listing and search application

Week 3: Modules, Packages, and Concurrency

• Go modules and dependency management
• Package organization and visibility
• Concurrency basics
• Goroutines and parallel execution
• Synchronization with WaitGroups
• Worker pools for concurrent task processing
• Race conditions and synchronization primitives
• sync.Once for one-time initialization
• Home assignment: Enhanced book management system with concurrency

Week 4: File Operations and Database Integration

• File handling and I/O operations
• Working with JSON and other file formats
• Introduction to databases
• GORM (Go Object Relational Mapper)
• Creating models and database migrations
• Basic CRUD operations
• Complex queries and relationships
• Home assignment: Migrating the book management system to use a database

Week 5: Web Development and REST APIs

• HTTP client operations
• Building web servers in Go
• Introduction to the net/http package
• Using the Gorilla Mux router
• REST API principles:
  • Client-server architecture
  • Statelessness
  • Cacheability
  • Layered systems
  • Code-on-demand
  • Uniform interfaces
• API documentation with Swagger
• Home assignment: Creating a RESTful API for the book management system

Week 6: Advanced Web Application Development

• Project structure and organization
• Separation of concerns
• Internal vs public packages
• Configuration management
• Middleware and authentication
• Error handling and logging
• API versioning
• Documentation
• Deployment considerations
• Final project: Complete bookstore API with authentication

Getting Started

Each week's directory contains the code examples and exercises covered during that week. To run the code examples:

1. Make sure you have Go installed (version 1.16+ recommended)
2. Navigate to the specific week's directory
3. Run the example files with go run filename.go

For projects with multiple files, follow the instructions in the respective week's README or comments.

Home Assignments

Throughout the course, students worked on a progressive book management system that evolved in complexity:

1. Week 2: Simple CLI book listing and searching
2. Week 3: Enhanced CLI with additional operations and concurrency
3. Week 4: Database integration with GORM
4. Week 5: RESTful API implementation
5. Week 6: Complete web application with authentication and documentation

Resources

• Official Go Documentation
• Go by Example
• GORM Documentation
• Gorilla Mux Router
• Swagger Documentation