# Introduction Welcome to **Building Web Apps with Go**! If you are reading this then you have just started your journey from noob to pro. No seriously, web programming in Go is so fun and easy that you won't even notice how much information you are learning along the way! Keep in mind that there are still portions of this book that are incomplete and need some love. The beauty of open source publishing is that I can give you an incomplete book and it is still of value to you. Before we get into all the nitty gritty details, let's start with some ground rules: ## Prerequisites To keep this tutorial small and focused, I'm assuming that you are prepared in the following ways: 1. You have installed the [Go Programming Language](https://golang.org). 1. You have setup a `GOPATH` by following the [How to Write Go Code](https://golang.org/doc/code.html#Organization) tutorial. 1. You are somewhat familiar with the basics of Go. (The [Go Tour](http://tour.golang.org) is a pretty good place to start) 1. You have installed all the [required packages](#) 1. You have installed the [Heroku Toolbelt](https://toolbelt.heroku.com/) 1. You have a [Heroku](https://id.heroku.com/signup) account ## Required Packages For the most part we will be using the built in packages from the standard library to build out our web apps. Certain lessons such as Databases, Middleware and URL Routing will require a third party package. Here is a list of all the go packages you will need to install before starting: | Name | Import Path | Description | |-----|-----|-----| | [httprouter](https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter) | github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter | A high performance HTTP request router that scales well | | [Negroni](https://github.com/codegangsta/negroni) | github.com/codegangsta/negroni | Idiomatic HTTP Middleware | | [Black Friday](https://github.com/russross/blackfriday) | github.com/russross/blackfriday | a markdown processor | | [Render](https://github.com/unrolled/render/tree/v1) | gopkg.in/unrolled/render.v1 | Easy rendering for JSON, XML, and HTML | | [SQLite3](https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3) | github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 | sqlite3 driver for go | You can install (or update) these packages by running the following command in your console ~~~ go get -u <import_path> ~~~ For instance, if you wish to install Negroni, the following command would be: ~~~ go get -u github.com/codegangsta/negroni ~~~