Job Ready Go

Lesson 2Understanding Go Basics

In this lesson, we will look at the basic building blocks of Go, including tokens, statements, comments, and identifiers. You will use these building blocks to create the code for your Go programs.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Explain the concept of a token.
• Use line breaks and semicolons appropriately to end statements.
• Add comments to a program.
• Describe naming conventions and restrictions for identifiers.

NOTE A lot of topics are covered in this lesson. Don't get overwhelmed if the information is new to you. We will cover most of the topics in this lesson in more detail in the next several lessons in this book. The intent of this lesson is to provide an introductory overview to help tie the upcoming lessons together.

UNDERSTANDING STATEMENTS AND TOKENS

A Go program is a series of statements. A Go statement is a series of tokens. In this context, a token refers to any meaningful object in a statement, including the following:

• Keyword: A reserved word used for special Go functionality
• Operators and punctuation: Symbols used to do mathematical operations and organize or perform special actions
• Identifier: Token used to identify things such as storage locations or functions that perform actions
• Literal: A specific value or number, such as 123 or “Hello, world”

We will look at each of these types of tokens in more detail in this and subsequent lessons. For now, consider the following statement ...