Prerequisites
Background knowledge
This book is designed for people who are new to Go, but you’ll probably find it more enjoyable if you have a general understanding of Go’s syntax first. If you find yourself struggling with the syntax, the Little Book of Go by Karl Seguin is a fantastic tutorial, or if you want something more interactive I recommend running through the Tour of Go.
I’ve also assumed that you’ve got a (very) basic understanding of HTML/CSS and SQL, and some familiarity with using your terminal (or command line for Windows users). If you’ve built a web application in any other language before — whether it’s Ruby, Python, PHP or C# — then this book should be a good fit for you.
Go 1.23
The information in this book is correct for the latest major release of Go (version 1.23), and you should install this if you’d like to code-along with the application build.
If you’ve already got Go installed, you can check the version number from your terminal by using the go version command. The output should look similar to this:
$ go version go version go1.23.0 linux/amd64
If you need to upgrade your version of Go — or install Go from scratch — then please go ahead and do that now. Detailed instructions for different operating systems can be found here:
- Removing an old version of Go
- Installing Go on Mac OS X
- Installing Go on Windows
- Installing Go on Linux
Other software
There are a few other bits of software that you should make sure are available on your computer if you want to follow along fully. They are:
The curl tool for working with HTTP requests and responses from your terminal. On MacOS and Linux machines it should be pre-installed or available in your software repositories. Otherwise, you can download the latest version from here.
A web browser with good developer tools. I’ll be using Firefox in this book, but Chromium, Chrome or Microsoft Edge will work too.
Your favorite text editor 😊