Practical Systems Programming in Go

Coming soon!

Go was never meant to be a toy language. From the moment it was conceived at Google, it was designed to tackle real problems — the kind that live at the intersection of performance, reliability and scale. And yet, for all its popularity, there are surprisingly few resources that treat Go as what it truly is: a systems programming language. That is the gap this book sets out to fill, starting from the ground up and working all the way to some genuinely advanced territory.

Building a Solid Foundation Link to heading

The journey begins where it must — with the essentials. Before you can do anything interesting with Go in a systems context, you need to be fluent in the language itself. That means understanding not just the syntax but the idioms: how Go thinks about data collections, how functions are first-class citizens and how the language’s type system guides you toward writing clear and correct code. These early chapters are not padding. They are the bedrock on which everything else is built and they are treated with the seriousness they deserve.

Concurrency Done Right Link to heading

One of Go’s most celebrated features is its concurrency model and this book gives it the thorough treatment it warrants. Goroutines and channels are the headline acts, but the real depth lies in understanding the Go scheduler, recognising race conditions before they bite you in production and knowing when to reach for mutexes, the sync package, or the context package. Concurrency is one of those topics where superficial understanding is arguably more dangerous than no understanding at all, so the goal here is to leave you genuinely confident rather than just vaguely familiar.

The Operating System is Your Friend Link to heading

Systems programming is fundamentally about talking to the operating system and a substantial portion of the book is devoted to exactly that. Working with files and the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces, handling UNIX signals gracefully, navigating the file system and understanding what these low-level interactions actually mean for a running process — these are the skills that distinguish a systems programmer from someone who merely writes software that happens to run on a system. Go’s standard library is remarkably well-suited to this kind of work and the chapters in this section show you how to take full advantage of it.

Data, Databases and the Network Link to heading

Modern systems do not exist in isolation. They read and write structured data, they talk to databases and they communicate over the network. The book walks through working with JSON, CSV and Relational databases before moving into the networking stack. TCP and UDP are explored at a level of detail that most Go books skip entirely, giving you the knowledge to build robust, low-level network services. From there, the jump to HTTP and web services feels natural rather than abrupt, because you understand what is happening beneath the abstraction.

Writing a Programming Language in Go Link to heading

This is where the book takes its most ambitious turn. Over two dedicated chapters, you will build a small interpreted programming language called SMALL entirely in Go — from lexer to parser to evaluator. Then, in a second chapter, you will extend it with new features, experiencing firsthand how a real language evolves and what that demands of its implementation. This is not a gimmick. Building a language, even a small one, forces you to think about data structures, recursion, evaluation strategies and software design in ways that few other projects can match. It is one of the most rewarding exercises any programmer can undertake and Go turns out to be a wonderful language in which to do it.

Time Series Analysis Link to heading

The final act moves into data science territory, but with a distinctly systems-programming flavour. Two chapters tackle time series data — first the algorithms for measuring distance and similarity between sequences, then the broader techniques of time series data mining. These are topics with real-world applications in monitoring, anomaly detection and observability and implementing them in Go gives you both a deeper understanding of the algorithms and a set of practical, performant tools you can actually use.

A Fitting Finale Link to heading

The book closes with a project that ties many of its themes together: building an indexer for UNIX files. It is a task that demands careful thinking about file I/O, data structures, performance and system interaction all at once — a fitting capstone for a book about systems programming. By the time you reach it, you will have the tools to approach it with confidence.

Who This Book Is For Link to heading

This is not a gentle introduction to Go, nor is it a cookbook of isolated recipes. It is a structured, progressive exploration of what Go can do when applied seriously to systems problems. If you want to understand how Go programs interact with the world beneath them — the operating system, the network, the file system, the data — and if you want to build things that are genuinely interesting along the way, this book was written for you.