Preface

My association with this book has been a memorable journey. Three years back, when Packt contacted me to write a book for them, I was not sure that would be something I would be able to achieve in the first place. But, with support from my family, friends, and a few great mentors at work, I have successfully made it. I always have a habit of explaining things, and I wanted to turn that into a more significant form – a book. That desire ended up evolving into a book called Building RESTful Web Services with Go in 2017. Looking back, it was not a bad idea at all.

I am an open source blogger apart from my full-time software development job. What I write about is what I learn at work. Every month, I work on many features, fix many bugs, and review many merge requests. I convert all that experience into articles. This book is a valuable collection of many of those experiences. You could ask me what provoked me to write this book? It is the burning desire to share things I know. Software engineering is a hard skill, and it has always been a practical discipline, unlike academic studies. That drove me to write Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go, which is a supercharged sequel to my first book.

In this age of information technology, products talk with each other using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In the last decade, the rise of a new generation of web languages, such as Python, JavaScript (Node.js), and Go, has shown a different approach to web development compared to traditional ones, such as ASP.NET and Java's Spring. In particular, the Go programming language hits the sweet spot of the enterprise versus prototype landscape. We can compare Go simultaneously to what "Python is to prototyping" and what "Java is to the enterprise." Some of the best open source tools, such as Docker, Terraform, and Kubernetes, are written in Go. Google uses it heavily for its internal services. You can see a list of Go-using companies at https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUsers.

With less verbose code, strict type checking, and support for concurrency, Go is a better language to write modern web servers. An intermediate Go developer can benefit a lot by knowing how to create RESTful services using Go. This book is an attempt to make the reader comfortable with web services development. Remember, it is a hands-on guide.

Industry experts are suggesting that, shortly, Python may move further into the data science domain, which could create a vacuum in the web development domain. Go has all the qualifications to fill that space. The paradigm shift from monoliths to microservices, and the need for robust API interfaces, may place Go high above interpreted languages.

Even though this book is not a cookbook, it offers many tips and tricks throughout your journey as a reader. This book is for software developers and web developers who want to develop RESTful web services and APIs using Go. It will also assist Python and Node.js developers who are interested in learning web development with Go.

I hope you enjoy this book, and that it helps take your career to the next level!