Go by Example

Content and build toolchain for Go by Example, a site that teaches Go via annotated example programs.

Overview

The Go by Example site is built by extracting code and comments from source files in examples and rendering them using templates into a static public directory. The programs implementing this build process are in tools, along with dependencies specified in the go.modfile.

The built public directory can be served by any static content system. The production site uses S3 and CloudFront, for example.

Building

To build the site you'll need Go installed. Run:

$ tools/build

To build continuously in a loop:

$ tools/build-loop

To see the site locally:

$ tools/serve

and open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ in your browser.

Publishing

To upload the site:

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...
$ tools/upload

License

This work is copyright Mark McGranaghan and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Go Gopher is copyright Renée French and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Translations

Contributor translations of the Go by Example site are available in:

• Chinese by gobyexample-cn
• French by keirua
• Italian by the Go Italian community
• Japanese by spinute
• Korean by mingrammer
• Russian by badkaktus
• Ukrainian by butuzov
• Brazilian Portuguese by lcslitx
• Vietnamese by s6k Gopher

Thanks

Thanks to Jeremy Ashkenas for Docco, which inspired this project.

FAQ

I found a problem with the examples; what do I do?

We're very happy to fix problem reports and accept contributions! Please submit an issue or send a Pull Request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

What version of Go is required to run these examples?

Given Go's strong backwards compatibility guarantees, we expect the vast majority of examples to work on the latest released version of Go as well as many older releases going back years.

That said, some examples show off new features added in recent releases; therefore, it's recommended to try running examples with the latest officially released Go version (see Go's release history for details).

I'm getting output in a different order from the example. Is the example wrong?

Some of the examples demonstrate concurrent code which has a non-deterministic execution order. It depends on how the Go runtime schedules its goroutines and may vary by operating system, CPU architecture, or even Go version.

Similarly, examples that iterate over maps may produce items in a different order from what you're getting on your machine. This is because the order of iteration over maps in Go is not specified and is not guaranteed to be the same from one iteration to the next.

It doesn't mean anything is wrong with the example. Typically the code in these examples will be insensitive to the actual order of the output; if the code is sensitive to the order - that's probably a bug - so feel free to report it.