Learning Go from blog posts and standard-library docs tends to raise more questions than it answers: how should a real project be structured, how do you avoid security mistakes, how do you manage dependencies properly? This book walks through building one complete, real-world web application to answer those questions directly.
What you'll learn
- The fundamentals: starting a server, creating handlers, sending responses, routing requests, and serving static files
- How to structure a web application in an idiomatic, scalable way
- Managing and version-controlling dependencies with Go modules
- Handling configuration through command-line flags
By the end, you come away with the confidence and hands-on understanding needed to build production-ready applications in Go, rather than just isolated syntax knowledge.
You might be wondering:
- Where can I see a concrete example of a real-world web application?
- How is it best to structure and organize my code?
- How do I make sure I’m not making any mistakes when it comes to security?
- How do I use modules to manage and version control dependencies?
- And how do I effectively test my web application?
Let’s Go answers these questions for you — and a whole lot more.
The book guides you through the start-to-finish build of a real-world application, so you'll gain all the knowledge, understanding and confidence you need to create production-ready applications with Go.
What You’ll Learn…
- All the fundamentals — How to start a server, create handlers, send responses, route requests and serve static files.
- Structure and organization — How to create an idiomatic and scalable structure for your web application.
- Using Modules — How to use Go's new Module functionality to manage and version control your dependencies.
- Managing configuration — How to use command-line flags and dependency injection to manage your application settings.
- Logging and Error Handling — How to implement leveled logging and centralized error handling.
- SQL databases — How to design a database model, set up a connection pool, and execute statements and queries.
- HTML templating — How to cache your templates, display dynamic data, create custom functions and handle runtime errors.
- Middleware — How to create your own middleware to perform common actions (like logging requests and recovering panics).
- RESTful routing — How to create a modern request routing structure that follows the principles of REST.
- Form validation — How to implement reusable and user-friendly pattern for validating forms and displaying errors.
- Session management — How to use and configure sessions to persist data between requests.
- Using HTTPS — How to correctly setup a HTTPS server and configure it for improved performance and security.
- Prevent common vulnerabilities — How to prevent SQL injection, CSRF, XSS, clickjacking and slow-client attacks.
- Authentication and authorization — How to safely encrypt user passwords and add signup, login and logout functionality.
- Request context — How to use Go's context.Context to pass data between your middleware and handlers.
- Testing — How to create unit tests, integration tests and end-to-end tests, mock dependencies and measure test coverage.
- And most importantly… How to put it together in a fully-functioning application!
