Jonathan Calhoun - Web Development with Go

While I have attempted to make this book accessible for beginners, there is a lot of material covered. Not only will we be writing a lot of Go code, but we will also be using HTML, CSS, SQL, Bootstrap, and the command line. That is a lot to take in all at once, and you likely wont remember it all after one reading.

My advice is to go through the book once stopping as little as possible. Your goal here isnt to understand everything in detail, but to just get a broad understanding of what all the pieces in a web application are and how they work together. You also want to code along with everything in the book so you can get familiar with writing Go code. This means no copy-pasting!

After your first pass, I would then recommend going through the book a second time. This time your goal is to try to gain a deeper understanding of everything, using the higher level understanding you gained in the first pass as a foundation to build on.

If you would like, you could also use this second pass to attempt to build a slightly different application than we build in the book while using the book as a guide. For example, you might try to create a simplistic Twitter clone where users can sign up, post tweets, and follow other users. This will force you to really challenge how well you understand the material.

While reading this book you are likely to come across some things you are unfamiliar with that you want to research further. To help aid you, I have created and continue to maintain a beginners guide with resources for diving deeper into Go, HTML, CSS, SQL, and the command line.

You can access the guide at: calhoun.io/beginners

If you are brand new to any of those technologies I would suggest first checking out the beginner guide and getting vaguely familiar with them. Vaguely is the keyword here. You DO NOT need to be an expert at any of the technologies I listed, but instead just need to be familiar enough that you can follow along as we use them in this course.

In addition to the beginners guide, you are also encouraged to join the Web Development with Go Slack to ask questions, create study groups, and learn with other students. This has proven to be a vital resource, especially amongst newcomers to programming.

Even if you are already familiar with programming, web development, or Go, this book is likely to be a great reference for years to come.

You may not benefit from reading it start to finish, but you will most certainly find sections that provide insights and ideas that you never considered before.

To assist in this, I have also provided access to the code used in the book after each section is completed. This means you can easily jump to the section you want to reference, get the code, and follow along without having to complete the entire book.

Web Development with Go takes an hands-on approach to teaching web development. You wont be reading about theoretical web applications. We wont be talking about imaginary situations. Instead, we will be building a photo gallery application (shown in ) that you will deploy to a production server at the end of the book.

Figure 1.1: A picture of the web application we will build

In the application we build, users can sign up for an account, create galleries, and then upload images to include in each gallery. Then once a gallery has been created, they can send a link to their clients/friends to share the gallery.

Our application will start off incredibly simple; it will be a single Hello, world page. As we progress through the book we will slowly introduce new pages, improve our code, and tackle each new problem as it arises.

With this approach we will eventually arrive at a production-ready web app, but more importantly you will understand why we made each decision we made and will have a better idea of how to make those decisions on your own moving forward.