Start learning Go

Updated at 2026-04-01 # Tech # Go

I’m going to spend 14 days learning the basics of Go. Here’s the work for day one.

Practice

Install the latest Go (1.26.1) from the official website Go Programming Language
Install the latest Visual Studio Code (1.114.0) from the official website Visual Studio Code - The open source AI code editor
Update PowerShell to version 7.6.0 from github PowerShell/PowerShell: PowerShell for every system!
Open Visual Studio Code, Click Extensions on the left sidebar, search for ‘Go’ in the search bar at the top
Install the first extension provided by Go Team at Google
Open terminal in Visual Studio Code using PowerShell and type:
```
go version
```
It will return something like:
```
go version go1.26.1 windows/amd64
```

Create a file named hello.go and write the first Go program:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
  fmt.Println("Go installed successfully!")
}

In terminal run command:

go run hello.go

It will output:

Go installed successfully

There’s no semicolon in the code, Go doesn’t require semicolons to end statements, the Go compiler automatically inserts them during parsing.
package main
- The keyword package is similar to Java’s package, but in Go it defines a module namespace.
- Only the main package is executable, other packages are used as libraries.
- In this code, we need to run the code directly, so it has to belong to package main
import “fmt”
- The keyword import can only be used to import package, since Go has no classes.
func main()
- Go uses the keyword func to declare functions. The full syntax is:
```
 func [receiver] FunctionName[TypeParams](parameters)(returnTypes) {
   // body
 }
```
- If the function name starts with an uppercase letter, it is public, if it starts with a lowercase letter, it is private.
fmt.Println()
- Call the Println() function from the fmt package