▲ 16 ▼ Web Development with Go - Chapters 1 - 3 (sample chapters)
I have been working on this book for a while, and its primary goal is to teach someone how to create web applications with Go by walking them from nothing all the way to finishing a complete photo gallery application like pixieset.com. The book was inspired a lot by Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, as this was the book that helped me learn Rails and I found the approach of building a real application (not a simple TODO app) from scratch to be a powerful learning tool. Even when you go to create your own custom application, using the book as a guideline for development is helpful.
I typically have people sign up for a mailing list to get the sample chapters, but I wanted to share the first three chapters here this weekend as a way of celebrating the book almost being done :)
Thanks for posting - this looks like a nice introduction for beginners, I agree building a real app is the best way to teach building web applications. It's probably really difficult to pitch this right and include enough detail for beginners without making it cluttered for those who are more familiar with programming or the Go language. Perhaps there's some way to hide some of the content and only expand explanations if the reader wants to (since it is html)? At the moment if you're familiar with some of the concepts there is a lot to wade through (e.g. box Box 2.5). I think perhaps the point 1.2 should make is that if you're familiar with all of Go/HTML the book isn't for you, but if you know HTML but not Go for example it would be a useful introduction?
Do you have a proposed table of contents somewhere?
http://www.usegolang.com/#chapters has the top level chapters and shoudl give you a rough idea of the outline. I can get you a more detailed outline if you think it would be helpful.
Right now I am writing the version with pretty much as much content as I think is necessary because I figure someone with experience can skip certain sections or skim them, but you are right - long term it would be nice to break them out in a way that is easy to skip. I don't know what specifically that will be yet, but I have a few ideas.
I also feel like later chapters in the book didn't seem to require as much background info as early chapters, and when they did a lot of that content was a chapter in itself. Eg the introduction to templates is an entire chapter on its own, and then the book continues by creating templates in the next chapter, so someone familiar with templates could likely skip the intro chapter altogether (none of that code is used in the app - it is all in an experimental directory) and use it as a reference. Same thing goes for the chapter discussing databases and how to use them - the entire intro chapter is experimental code never used in the app, and then the next chapter applies the knowledge into the real app.
Thanks, I missed the actual site! There is lots more detail there. Perhaps it's worth linking back to the site in a really prominent way at the top of your sample book pages or the start of the book?
I think you are right. I'll update that later today.