Fifth Edition
The Iris book
The Professional Guide to the Iris Web Framework for Go. 24 chapters, 437 pages, free to read online and free to download.
Free, and nothing to fill in
The whole book, as a PDF and as 26 pages on this site. No registration, no email address, no payment. If it helps you, sponsoring the project is the only ask, and it lives on its own page rather than in front of the download.
What is in it
The chapters build on one another and are best read in order the first time. Afterwards each one stands alone as a reference.
- Foundation (chapters 1 to 3). Installation, the framework’s core concepts, and the builder that assembles a production application.
- The Request Path (chapters 4 to 7). Routing and controllers, reading requests, writing responses, and the middleware pipeline.
- Application Structure (chapters 8 to 11). Dependency injection, error handling, authentication and authorization, and configuration.
- Middleware and Data (chapters 12 to 15). The built-in middleware, database integration, caching and internationalization.
- Running in Production (chapters 16 to 20). Testing, observability, security, deployment and performance.
- Going Further (chapters 21 to 24). AI backends, complete applications, the upgrade path to v14, and the framework’s extension points.
How it is written
Every chapter opens with a Background section that explains the underlying concepts in plain language: what an HTTP header actually is, what a database transaction guarantees, what authentication means. No prior specialty knowledge is assumed, and a reader who already knows a chapter's fundamentals can skip that section entirely. Each chapter closes with a Further Reading list of canonical references.
Code examples use full import paths and are complete enough to adapt directly. Every one of them was checked against the framework source rather than written from memory, which is the single reason to trust a book about a library over a search result.
Two formats, one text
Written by Gerasimos Maropoulos, who also wrote the framework. What you read on this site and what you download are the same text, cut from the same source at each release, so a chapter can never say one thing here and another in the PDF.
Each chapter is also served as plain markdown, at its own address plus .md. For example /docs/error-handling.md. Found a mistake? Say so in the discussions.