LEARNING PATH
Curriculum: Go for Backend Development
Go confidently from zero to shipping backend services in Go — REST APIs, background workers, CLIs — production-quality.
⏱ ~4-6 weeks part-time (3-6 hrs/day equivalent). 💸 $0 — every resource below is free. Verified links. ✓ verified 2026-08-09 6 stages + capstone
LOADING MAP…
WHY THIS PATH
You already know how to build backends — NestJS, Postgres, Redis, AWS. Go gives you: 10-50x lower latency tail, trivial deployment (single static binary), goroutines instead of thread-pool gymnastics, and a language where the standard library does 80% of the work. The goal isn't "learn a language" — it's "translate what you know into Go's idioms." Every stage below marks the translation point explicitly.
THE RULES
- No paid resources, ever — if a paid course is "essential," there's a free equivalent. (The one exception: Alex Edwards' *Let's Go* book is worth the $0 sample chapters + free site.)
- Do the checkpoints, not just the reading — the checkpoints ARE the curriculum; the links are just fuel.
- `-race` on every test run — concurrency bugs are the #1 Go-newbie production incident.
- Commit every checkpoint — GitHub history is the proof (job-hunt ammunition).
- If a link dies, it gets fixed — this file is maintained, not archived.