Welcome to a book about Ballerina - a language that actually thought about how we build software in 2025, rather than pretending we're still writing command-line utilities in the 1970s.
This book will teach you Ballerina, a cloud-native programming language designed specifically for building network services, APIs, and integrations. But don't worry, we're not going to bore you with enterprise buzzword soup. We're going to have some fun while learning a genuinely interesting language.
You already know how to code. Maybe you've built REST APIs that made you question your life choices. Perhaps you've wrestled with microservices that seemed simple until you tried to deploy them. You've probably written the same HTTP client boilerplate a hundred times and wondered why your language doesn't just... do it for you.
This book is for you.
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Introduction: Why Another Programming Language? The honest truth about why Ballerina exists and why you might actually care.
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Chapter 1: Getting Started Installation, your first program, and realizing this isn't just "Java for JSON."
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Chapter 2: The Network-Aware Type System Where we discover that types can actually help instead of getting in the way.
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Chapter 3: Services and APIs Building HTTP services without wanting to flip a table.
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Chapter 4: Data and Integration Working with JSON, XML, databases, and message queues like it's the 21st century.
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Chapter 5: Concurrency Done Right Parallel programming that doesn't make your brain hurt.
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Chapter 6: Real-World Patterns Circuit breakers, retries, observability, and all the things that separate toys from production code.
I'm going to be honest with you. I'll tell you when Ballerina is brilliant and when it's quirky. I'll show you how it solves real problems, and I won't pretend every design decision is perfect. We're going to learn by doing, and we're going to have fun doing it.
Most importantly: no enterprise jargon unless absolutely necessary. We're developers, not PowerPoint slides.
Ready to see what happens when a programming language is designed for the cloud-native world from the ground up? Let's dive in.
License: This work is licensed under the same license as this repository. See LICENSE for details.