Conclusion

Over the course of this book we’ve explicitly covered a lot of topics, including routing, templating, working with a database, authentication/authorization, using HTTPS, using Go’s testing package and more.

But there have been some other, more tacit, lessons too. The patterns that we’ve used to implement features — and the way that our project code is organized and links together — is something that you should be able to take and apply in your future work.

Importantly, I also wanted the book to convey that you don’t need a framework to build web applications in Go. Go’s standard library contains almost all the tools that you need… even for a moderately complex application. For the times that you do need help with a specific task — like session management, CSRF mitigation or password hashing — there are lightweight and focused third-party packages that you can reach for.

At this point, if you’ve coded along with the book, I recommend taking a bit of time to review the code that you’ve written so far. As you go through it, make sure that you’re clear in your mind about what each part of the codebase does, and how it fits in with the project as a whole.

You might also want to circle back to any parts of the book that you found difficult to understand the first-time around. For example, now that you’re more familiar with Go, the http.Handler interface chapter might be easier to digest. Or, now that you’ve seen how testing is handled in our application, the decisions we made in the designing a database model chapter might click into place.

If you bought the Professional Package version of this book, then I strongly recommend working through the guided exercises in chapter 16 (right at the end of this book, after this conclusion). The exercises should help to consolidate what you’ve learned — and working through them semi-independently will give you some extra practice with the patterns and techniques from this book before you use them again in your own projects.

Let's Go Further

If you’d like to continue learning more, then you might want to check out Let’s Go Further. It’s written as a follow-up to this book, and it covers more advanced patterns for developing, managing and deploying APIs and web applications.

It guides you through the start-to-finish build and deployment of a RESTful JSON API, and includes topics like:

• Sending and receiving JSON
• Working with SQL migrations
• Managing background tasks
• Performing partial updates and using optimistic locking
• Permission-based authorization
• Controlling CORS requests
• Graceful shutdowns
• Exposing application metrics
• Automating build and deployment steps

You can check out a sample of the book, and get more information and FAQ answers at https://lets-go-further.alexedwards.net.