Best practices in Go - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Best practices in Go programming

📖 Scenario: You are working on a small Go program that calculates the total price of items in a shopping cart. You want to write clean, readable, and maintainable code following Go best practices.

🎯 Goal: Build a Go program that defines a map of items with their prices, calculates the total price using a loop, and prints the result. You will apply best practices such as clear variable naming, proper indentation, and concise code.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a map named items with string keys and float64 values

Create a variable named total to hold the sum of prices

Use a for loop with variables item and price to iterate over items

Add each price to total

Print the total price with a clear message

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Calculating totals from a list of products and prices is common in shopping cart applications and billing systems.

💼 Career

Understanding maps, loops, and formatted output is essential for Go developers working on backend services, e-commerce platforms, and data processing.

1

Create the items map

Create a map called items with these exact entries: "apple": 0.99, "banana": 0.59, "orange": 1.29

Go

# Create the items map with prices
# Your code here

Hint

Use map[string]float64 to create a map with string keys and float64 values.

2

Add a total variable

Create a variable called total of type float64 and set it to 0

Go

package main

func main() {
    items := map[string]float64{"apple": 0.99, "banana": 0.59, "orange": 1.29}
    // Create total variable
    // Your code here
}

Hint

Use var total float64 = 0 to declare the variable.

3

Calculate the total price

Use a for loop with variables item and price to iterate over items. Add each price to total

Go

package main

func main() {
    items := map[string]float64{"apple": 0.99, "banana": 0.59, "orange": 1.29}
    var total float64 = 0
    // Loop over items and add prices to total
    // Your code here
}

Hint

Use for item, price := range items to loop over the map.

4

Print the total price

Write fmt.Printf to print the message Total price: $ followed by the value of total with two decimal places

Go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    items := map[string]float64{"apple": 0.99, "banana": 0.59, "orange": 1.29}
    var total float64 = 0
    for item, price := range items {
        total += price
    }
    // Print the total price
    // Your code here
}

Hint

Use fmt.Printf("Total price: $%.2f\n", total) to format the output with two decimals.