Chapter 1, Our First API in Go, quickly introduces—or reintroduces—some core concepts related to Go setup and usage as well as the http package.

Chapter 2, RESTful Services in Go, focuses on the guiding principles of the REST architecture and translates them into our overall API design infrastructure.

Chapter 3, Routing and Bootstrapping, is devoted to applying the RESTful practices from the previous chapter to built-in, third-party, and custom routers for the scaffolding of our API.

Chapter 4, Designing APIs in Go, explores overall API design while examining other related concepts, such as utilization of web sockets and HTTP status codes within the REST architecture.

Chapter 5, Templates and Options in Go, covers ways to utilize the OPTIONS request endpoints, implementing TLS and authentication, and standardizing response formats in our API.

Chapter 6, Accessing and Using Web Services in Go, explores ways to integrate other web services for authentication and identity in a secure way.

Chapter 7, Working with Other Web Technologies, focuses on bringing in other critical components of application architecture, such as frontend reverse proxy servers and solutions, to keep session data in the memory or datastores for quick access.

Chapter 8, Responsive Go for the Web, looks at expressing the values of our API as a consumer might, but utilizing frontend, client-side libraries to parse and present our responses.

Chapter 9, Deployment, introduces deployment strategies, including utilization of processes to keep our server running, highly accessible, and interconnected with associated services.

Chapter 10, Maximizing Performance, stresses upon various strategies for keeping our API alive, responsive, and fast in production. We look at caching mechanisms that are kept on disk as well as in memory, and explore ways in which we can distribute these mechanisms across multiple machines or images.

Chapter 11, Security, focuses more on best practices to ensure that your application and sensitive data are protected. We look at eliminating SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks.

To use the examples in this book, you can utilize any one of a Windows, Linux, or OS X machine, though you may find Windows limiting with some of the third-party tools we'll be using.

You'll obviously need to get the Go language platform installed. The easiest way to do this is through a binary, available for OS X or Windows at [URL]. Go is also readily available via multiple Linux package managers, such as yum or aptitude.

The choice of the IDE is largely a personal issue, but we recommend Sublime Text, which has fantastic Go support, among other languages. We'll spend a bit more time detailing some of the pros and cons of the other common IDEs in Chapter 1, Our First API in Go.

We'll utilize quite a few additional platforms and services, such as MySQL, MongoDB, Nginx, and more. Most should be available across platforms, but if you're running Windows, it's recommended that you consider running a Linux platform—preferably an Ubuntu server—on a virtual machine to ensure maximum compatibility.

This book is intended for developers who are experienced in both Go and server-side development for web services and APIs. We haven't spent any time on the basics of programming in Go, so if you're shaky on that aspect, it's recommended that you brush up on it prior to diving in.

The target reader is comfortable with web performance at the server level, has some familiarity with REST as a guiding principle for API design, and is at least aware of Go's native server capabilities.

We don't anticipate that you'll be an expert in all the technologies covered, but fundamental understanding of Go's core library is essential, and general understanding of networked server architecture setup and maintenance is ideal.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Now download the julia-n.m.p-win64.exe file on a temporary folder."

A block of code is set as follows:

package main

import (
  "fmt"
)
func main() {
  fmt.Println("Here be the code")
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold as follows:

package main
import (
  "fmt"
)

func stringReturn(text string) string {
  return text
}

func main() {
  myText := stringReturn("Here be the code")
  fmt.Println(myText)
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

curl --head http://localhost:8080/api/user/read/1111
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:09:30 GMT
Content-Length: 12
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When a user clicks on Accept, we'll be returned to our redirect URL with the code that we're looking for."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to <[email protected]>, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.