Who Should Be Reading This Book #

When started, this effort had the vague and ill-formed idea that you, our reader, would be somebody who understands how the web works and knows how to program in go. If that sounds like you, you can go to the fridge and get a snack.

If you would like a bit more specificity related to the web, we assume you understand what html and css are and what their respective purposes are. Further, we assume you know at least the basics of go (aka golang) programming. If you have experience in C or python you’ll find golang quite familiar and you can probably scrape by.

There really is no particular reason that golang is required to build programs using datastar. The datastar library on the browser side is implemented as a small amount of javascript (about 15Kb) and the library neither knows nor cares how the back-end is implemented. In fact, demonstrations have been done with node and haskell on the back end–but they are not supported to the degree that golang is. The datastar machinery would work acceptably with any back-end programming language for which there were helper functions, but the authors think that golang is particularly well suited for datastar.

Continuing our potentially wrong assumptions, we assume you are familiar how to use command line tools in a unix-ish environment. For example, we have no plan to explain what PATH or how it works. So, if that’s a mystery too you, you probably want to read another book first and then come back to us. We developed this content primarily on macOS and linux laptops, so things are the best tested there.

Finally, we assume that you are familiar with at least one templating language or templating tool. There are dozens of these types of tools available in the open-source community and, ultimately, they all do the same thing. Although you may not be familiar with the one we are using in these lessons, it is not that different from whatever you have seen before.

The most problematic assumption we have made about our readers that you don’t have much experience with Javascript—perhaps none. This is a difficult assumption for two reasons:

• People who are interested in “front end” or “ui” development today often have a lot of experience with Javascript; many even write Javascript for a living. These folks with such experience could certainly be interested in how the datastar layer works inside the browser or various things you can do to integrate datastar on the backend with javascript on the front-end.

• Readers with little or no javascript experience may find the (ahem) idiosyncratic issues with javascript in a browser more confusing than edifying. We can’t and won’t fit yet another book about Javascript inside this one.

So, the compromise we have reached is to do little, but not no, discussion of Javascript-related issues in Datastar and to pursue them only as they become needed.
However, these will be done with the little “details” box and readers that are unfamiliar with Javascript can just leave the little arrow turned to the side and be on their merry way.

Stephen Weinberg, the Nobel-prize winning physicist, wrote the excellent, thin volume, The First Three Minutes. He said in his introduction that he hoped that he had written a book that any reasonably intelligent individual could read and understand without a physics or mathematics background. He said the book didn’t require more mathematics than multiplication. He may have achieved this, but we have no such lofty ambitions. We’re in it for the memes.