Declaring variables is one of the most fundamental things in any programming language, and declaring variables in Go is a little different than in languages like C++ or Java.  In languages like C++ and Java you declare the variable type first followed by its name, such as "string name;".  This is a string variable named name.

In Go it's the other way around.  To declare a variable of type string called name in Go, you do it like this.

var name string

You can read this by saying, "Name is a string".  If you want to initialize this string to a beginning value it's done in the familiar way.

var name string = "Some Name"

In fact, just like using the "auto" keyword in C++, the Go compiler can infer the type of the variable above so we can omit the string declaration and write it like this.

var name = "Some Name"

Go will know that the "name" variable is a string just from how it's being assigned to.  Keep in mind though that once the type of a variable is inferred, it keeps that type for the rest of the program.  For instance one the "name" variable is inferred as being a string you can't change it to an int or some other type later.

Another way to declare and initialize a variable all at once is using the ":=" operator.  For something simple like a string it might not have many advantages over using the var keyword, but it can come in handy when dealing with more complex types and data.

name := "Some Name"

Even if declaring variables in this way seems unfamiliar at first, once you use it for a while it becomes very comfortable.