Go Backend Engineer's Guide [Bundle of 3 Books]

This book takes its time to go over every important aspect of backend programming, from the fundamentals to more advanced techniques, so that you can become experts in Go scripting and all the things Go can do. Quickly introducing readers to Go and its ecosystem, the book walks them through installing the language and creating a development environment with Visual Studio Code. Next, it takes a baby step into learning the basics of building web servers with the net/http package, going over topics like routing, handling various HTTP methods, and the structures of requests and responses. Path variables, regex-based routing, custom handlers, and middleware are some of the advanced routing topics covered, which uses the robust gorilla/mux package. After introducing session and cookie management, the book moves on to user authentication, covering topics such as OAuth2 integration, JWT for secure APIs, and more.

The book then teaches various aspects of database integration with GORM, covering topics such as connecting to SQL databases, performing CRUD operations, managing migrations, and handling transactions and concurrency control. The Gin framework for designing and implementing microservices, REST and gRPC for inter-service communication, and Kubernetes for containerizing applications are also covered in detail. Also covered is message brokering with Apache Kafka and NSQ for asynchronous systems, which guarantees resilient systems and efficient message delivery. Secure coding practices, HTTPS with crypto/tls, avoiding SQL injections and XSS attacks, and configuration management with Viper are also one of the main goal of the book.

Last but not least, the book covers testing and debugging with tools such as Delve, Testify, and GoMock. It then teaches readers through various deployment strategies, such as blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments with AWS CodeDeploy. Utilizing Go's robust features and clean scripting capabilities, this book provides you with the necessary knowledge and skills to develop secure, scalable, and resilient backend systems.

Key Learnings

• Get to know Go's ecosystem and tools to set up and configure backend development efficiently.
• Web servers can be easily built and managed using Go's net/http package for dynamic content delivery.
• Use gorilla/mux to implement advanced routing techniques for flexible URL handling.
• Implement strong API security with user authentication using OAuth2 and JWT.
• Make use of GORM's advanced capabilities of migrations and transactions, to integrate SQL databases.
• Use Gin, Kubernetes, and gRPC to build and launch scalable microservices.
• Make use of NSQ and Kafka for asynchronous processing.
• Prevent frequent vulnerabilities of SQL injection and XSS attacks.
• Use Testify, GoMock, and Delve to streamline testing and debugging.
• Use AWS CodeDeploy with blue-green and canary deployment strategies to deploy applications.

Table of Content

1. Understanding Go for Backend Development
2. Building a Basic Web Server with net/http
3. Advanced Routing with gorilla/mux
4. User Authentication with Oauth2 and JWT
5. Integrating Databases with GORM
6. Creating Microservices in Go
7. Message Brokering with NSQ and Apache Kafka
8. Securing Go Applications
9. Testing and Debugging Go Applications
10. Deploying Go Applications

This is a new edition of "Web Programming with Go" and it's designed to help both entry-level and professional developers build and launch functional web applications using Go's core libraries. Every chapter gives you practical lessons, from setting up Go projects and building strong backend routes to frontend-backend integration, session management, authentication, concurrency, and connecting external APIs.

This book is a hands-on way to learn key skills like testing, logging, error handling and performance tuning, all explained in simple, direct language. The real code and examples make it easy to understand and use the concepts. It covers nearly every major aspect of Go web development, but keeps examples straightforward and avoids complex edge cases, making it ideal for learners and practitioners who want clarity and reliable progress. You'll learn to structure projects, design backend services, manage sessions, secure authentication, and integrate external APIs with step-by-step Bookstore examples. It's got clear, practical techniques for routing, concurrency, testing, logging, performance and error handling, and it uses code that's easy to understand and explanations that are easy to follow.

Basically, this book looks at modern Go features without getting into complicated or niche scenarios, making the lessons useful for real projects. This edition makes it easy for you to get from setup to deployment by focusing on simplicity over unnecessary detail.

Key Features

• Get your web projects sorted with Go, using organised code, a modular design, and real-world workflows.
• You'll build, secure and test RESTful APIs using Go's net/http, Gorilla Mux and JSON best practices.
• Put in place user authentication, role-based access, and strong password protection to make sure your users have a safe experience.
• Get the front end and back end talking to each other by having clear API contracts and simple JSON data interchange practices.
• Use Go's concurrency tools to boost performance, scale up data fetching, and avoid deadlocks.
• Mock databases, APIs, and dependencies for fast, isolated, and reliable automated test routines.
• Set up session management, secure cookies, and resilient authentication flows to keep users logged in.
• Keep an eye on, log and trace application events to quickly find and fix problems.
• Use Go's HTTP client patterns to integrate payment gateways, external APIs, and third-party services.
• Come up with easy-to-understand error messages and stick to the standard incident response plans.

Table of Content

1. Introduction to Web Development in Go
2. Structuring Go Web Application
3. Handling HTTP Requests and Routing
4. Templating and Rendering Content
5. Interaction with Databases
6. Concurrency in Go
7. Sessions, Authentication, and Authorization
8. Frontend and Backend Communication
9. Testing and Debugging

With Go 1.25, you get a runtime that reads the CPU quota of its own container, a standard library that closes long-standing gaps in filesystem safety and JSON handling, and a testing package that makes concurrent behaviour deterministic. And this second edition puts all of it to excellent use.

This book is all about building one system, rather than a bunch of snippets in a folder. This means you can size a connection pool based on its own statistics, run 40,000 jobs on a fixed number of goroutines, retry serialisation conflicts without corrupting a ledger, and hold tens of thousands of open connections without exhausting file descriptors. Each recipe tackles a real problem, and then there's the simplest code to solve it, along with the reasoning behind when to use it again. Whether you're a developer who's already got some experience with Go and now needs it to get by in production, we've got you covered.

• Size worker pools and concurrency limits from measured CPU and memory budgets
• Confine untrusted file paths so traversal attacks fail in the kernel
• Test 30 secs timeouts in milliseconds using testing/synctest and its virtual clock
• Propagate one timeout budget across every service hop without starving downstream callers
• Retry serialisation conflicts and deadlocks safely with bounded, jittered transaction backoff
• Find goroutine leaks from a profile and prove their absence in tests
• Read escape analysis and pprof profiles to remove the allocations that matter
• Drain response bodies so HTTP connections return to the pool and stay reused
• Ship schema changes across rolling updates using expand, switch, and contract releases
• Harden services with govulncheck, minimal images, and secrets that never touch disk

1. Up and Running with Go 1.25
2. Go Advanced and Concurrency
3. File Handling and Data Processing
4. Building and Managing Go APIs
5. RPC and gRPC Services
6. Automation and Concurrency at Scale
7. Microservices Architecture
8. Strengthening Database Interactions
9. Performance, Profiling and Resource Management
10. Networking, Protocols and Security

This book is for every Go programmer who wants to bring error-free performance, immediate troubleshooting to issues, better reliability and active security. All you need is basics of Go and nothing beyond to pursue this book.