Learn Go gracefully — A practical journey into Go
From your first
fmt.Printlnto deploying serverless microservices on AWS.
The Way of the Gopher is a book and open-source learning guide designed to teach the Go programming language with a real-world, hands-on approach. Whether you're just starting or already familiar with Go, this guide takes you through a progressive learning path focused on:
- Writing clean and idiomatic Go
- Applying best practices and SOLID principles
- Building real microservices with Clean Architecture
- Deploying serverless applications with AWS CDK
All content is available in English and Spanish.
The book is divided into 4 main parts:
- Installation and setup
- Installing Go (Windows, macOS, Linux)
- Setting up your workspace
- Introduction to go mod and dependency management
- Writing and running your first Go program
- Basic syntax, types, structs and methods, functions
- Variables, constants, types
- Conditionals and loops
- Arrays, slices, maps
- Functions and scope
- Defining and using structs
- Methods and receivers
- Pointers and references
- Interfaces and composition
- Interfaces by example
- Duck typing and polymorphism
- Composition over inheritance
- Error handling
- The Go error philosophy
- Custom errors and errors.Is/As
- Sentinel errors and wrapping
- Goroutines and channels
- Goroutines: basic usage and pitfalls
- Channels: communication and patterns
- Select, timeouts, fan-in/fan-out
- Contexts and cancellation
- Clean Code with Go
- Naming conventions, comments
- Readability and maintainability
- Organizing code into packages
- Applying SOLID principles
- Adapting SOLID to Go idioms
- Dependency injection
- Interfaces and boundaries
- Unit tests and mocks
- Table-driven tests
- Using testing and testify
- Creating mocks manually and with tools
- Clean Architecture (for real)
- Layers and responsibilities
- Dependency inversion with interfaces
- Folder structure for real projects
- Intro to AWS CDK in TypeScript
- CDK basics: stacks, constructs, apps
- Synth and deploy
- Integrating with GitHub
- Building Lambdas with Go
- Writing AWS Lambda functions in Go
- Deploying Lambdas with CDK
- Environment variables and IAM roles
- Integration with API Gateway, SQS/SNS, DynamoDB, S3
- API Gateway and Lambdas
- DynamoDB: reads, writes, pagination
- SQS and SNS: event-driven communication
- S3: file upload and storage
- Basic CI/CD with GitHub Actions
- Linting, testing, building Go projects
- CDK deploy automation
- Secrets management
- Complete microservice with Go + Clean Architecture
- Requirements and design
- Architecture diagram
- Technologies used
- Use cases and domain entities
- Input/output ports and adapters
- Implementing workflows
- Asynchronous events, logs, error handling
- Logs, metrics, tracing
- Error handling and retries
- Infrastructure with CDK
- CDK resources setup
- Deployment pipelines
- Tests and deployments
- Local development and testing
The book is currently available in:
- 🇬🇧 English
- 🇪🇸 Español
We welcome contributions in other languages! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more info.
- Developers learning Go for the first time
- Engineers wanting to apply Go to real, scalable systems
- People interested in clean code, architecture, and cloud development
You’ll need:
- A computer
- Go installed
- Basic terminal knowledge
- Curiosity and motivation to build things
Contributions are welcome! You can:
- Fix typos, grammar or code examples
- Suggest new topics or improvements
- Help with translations
- Submit examples or case studies
Please read our CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.
- Follow updates on Bluesky
- Open issues or feedback
This project is licensed under the MIT License.
“The journey of a thousand lines begins with a single
go run.”