The Power of Go: Tools (Go 1.24 edition)

English | 2025 | 273 Pages | PDF, EPUB | 10 MB

This friendly, supportive, yet challenging book will show you how master software engineers think, and guide you through the process of designing production-ready command-line tools in Go step by step.

How do you break down a problem into manageable chunks? How do you test functions before you’ve written them? How do you design reusable libraries and tools that delight users? These are all questions I’ve encountered many times, and (good news!) The Power of Go: Tools has the answers.

What you’ll learn
It may be fun and easy reading, but this book is also a serious challenge. At each stage there are problems for you to solve, code to write, and design questions to ponder.

Throughout the twelve chapters and 260+ pages, you’ll be tested to your limits, as you learn the intricacies of flags and arguments, files and filesystems, commands, shells and pipelines, JSON and YAML wrangling, and even sophisticated API clients.

As we work together to develop increasingly powerful and delightful tools in Go, you’ll learn how to test behaviour, not functions; how to reduce error-handling boilerplate and eliminate paperwork; and how to make sure the user is the one having fun.