A Tour of the Standard Library

Part of the Go course

There is a moment in learning any language where you stop wondering how to write a loop and start wondering how to read a file, or format a date, or turn your data into something another program can understand. In a lot of languages the answer is to go shopping: find a package, check whether it is maintained, add it to your project, and hope.

Go's answer is usually that it is already there. The standard library is the collection of packages that ship with Go itself, and it is unusually large and unusually good. Reading files, parsing text, timing things, encoding data, serving web requests: all of it comes in the box, written by the same people, following the same conventions, and guaranteed to keep working.