The Go programming language commonly referred to as Golang, is a general-purpose programming language, developed by Google in 2007. The first version of Go was released in 2012.

The Go programming language is an open-source project considered an expressive, concise, clean, and efficient programming language. Go can compile to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time application. It is a faster, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

What can I use Go for?

According to the documentation, you can use Go for the following:

• Cloud and Network Services
• Command line interfaces (CLIs)
• Web development
• DevOps and SRE

Installing Go

To install Go, we should follow the official docs here

To check if the version is properly installed, use the following command in your terminal:

go version

Confirm that the command prints the installed version of go.

Conclusion

This tutorial tells us what Go is, and how Go is installed and we'll get started with programming in go in the following lessons in the series.