Many of the normal concerns you face as an application developer are amplified by the challenges of web-scale concurrency, real-time performance expectations, multi-core support, and efficiently consuming services without constantly managing I/O blocks. Although it's possible to solve most of these issues with existing languages and frameworks, Go is designed to handle them right out of the box, making for a more natural and productive coding experience. Developed at Google for its own internal use, Go now powers dozens of nimble startups, along with name brands like Canonical, Heroku, SoundCloud, and Mozilla, who rely on highly performant services for their infrastructure.

Go in Action introduces the Go language, guiding you from inquisitive developer to Go guru. The book begins by introducing the unique features and concepts of Go. (We assume you're up to speed with another programming language already, so don't expect to spend a lot of time rehearsing stuff you already know.) Then, you'll get hands-on experience writing real-world applications including web sites and network servers, as well as techniques to manipulate and convert data at speeds that will make your friends jealous. In the final chapters, you'll go in-depth with the language and see the tricks and secrets that the Go masters are using to make their applications perform. For example, you'll learn to use Go's powerful reflection libraries and work with real-world examples of integration with C code.

Brian Ketelsen and Erik St. Martin are the organizers of GopherCon an annual conference for Go developers and coauthors of the Go-based Skynet framework.Both Brian and Eric work with Go daily in a high-stakes production setting. William Kennedy is a seasoned software developer, author of the blog GoingGo.Net, and organizer for the Go-Miami and Miami MongoDB meetups.