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Welcome to Learn HTTP Servers

In a way, this course is where everything you've learned so far on the Boot.dev back-end path comes together. Building HTTP servers is the bread-and-butter of a backend developer's day-to-day work.

This course assumes you already have a solid understanding of Go. If you don't, take a step back and take our Go course.

Goals of This Course

Understand what web servers are and how they power real-world web applications
Build a production-style HTTP server in Go, without the use of a framework
Use JSON, headers, and status codes to communicate with clients via a RESTful API
Learn what makes Go a great language for building fast web servers
Use type safe SQL to store and retrieve data from a Postgres database
Implement a secure authentication/authorization system with well-tested cryptography libraries
Build and understand webhooks and API keys
Document the REST API with markdown

What Is a Server?

A web server is just a computer that serves data over a network, typically the Internet. Servers run software that listens for incoming requests from clients. When a request is received, the server responds with the requested data.

Any server worth its salt can handle many requests at the same time. In Go, we use a new goroutine for each request to handle them concurrently. Let's start by practicing with goroutines.

Assignment

In this course, we'll be working on a product called "Chirpy". Chirpy is a social network similar to Twitter.

One of Chirpy's servers is processing requests unbelievably slowly. Use a goroutine to fix the bug in the handleRequests (not handleRequest) function. The server should be able to process all the requests within the time limit.