Foreword

When I heard that Matt Farina and Matt Butcher were starting a new book on Go, I was excited. Both have been key contributors in the Go ecosystem for years, and have extensive work experience and backgrounds that flavor the prose in this book with the spice of past learnings. The book is intended as a spiritual successor to Go in Action, taking you beyond the basics that we introduced there and into more practical learning.

The book is broken into four easily digestible parts, each with a different focus. Part 1 is a refresher on key Go concepts. If you’re in a hurry and comfortable with your Go skills, you can safely skip this section, but I discourage that. In reviewing the final manuscript, I found nuggets of such value that I think everyone would benefit from these chapters.

Part 2 dives into the mechanics of managing a Go application in the real world. The chapter on errors is one of the best treatises on Go errors I’ve ever read, and the chapter on debugging and testing provides useful information on that crucial middle step of application development that takes your application from proof of concept to reliable production system.

In part 3, you’ll learn about ways to create user interfaces for your application. The chapter on templates is an excellent guide to what many find to be a complicated part of Go’s ecosystem. You’ll see practical ways to reuse your templates and make your web interfaces more dry. The examples alone are worth the price of the book, as it’s difficult to find examples of template usage that can be easily mapped to a real-world application. Later, you’ll see how to create and consume a standards-compliant REST API and learn the tricks to properly versioning that API.

The final section of the book moves into the interoperability layer that’s required in nearly every application today. You’ll dive deep into cloud infrastructure and see where Go fits in the cloud-computing model. You’ll finish with great coverage of microservices and service-to-service communication patterns.

Whether you’re just coming to Go or you’ve been writing Go applications for years, this book has vital knowledge that will help you take your application development to the next level. The authors do a great job of presenting complex information with a unified voice and in a manner that’s easy to digest. I’m excited for the publication of this book and the value that it brings to the Go community. I hope that you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I have.

—BRIAN KETELSEN

CO-AUTHOR OF GO IN ACTION

CO-FOUNDER OF GOPHER ACADEMY