Automate Your Home Using Go
Now in Beta from The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Fellow Medium readers, I have some exciting news to share with you. My new book from Pragmatic Bookshelf was released as a beta on November 1, 2023. It’s called Automate Your Home Using Go with the even more specific subtitle: Build a Personal Data Center with Raspberry Pi, Docker, Prometheus, and Grafana.
Here’s a quick description of what the book has to offer:
Take control of your home and your data with the power of the Go programming language. Build extraordinary and robust home automation solutions that rival much more expensive, closed commercial alternatives, using the same tools found in high-end enterprise computing environments. Best-selling Pragmatic Bookshelf authors Ricardo Gerardi and Mike Riley show how you can use inexpensive Raspberry Pi hardware and excellent, open-source Go-based software tools like Prometheus and Grafana to create your own personal data center. Using the step-by-step examples in the book, build useful home automation projects that you can use as a blueprint for your own custom projects.
This is the very first time I have written for PragProg with another writer. My coauthor, Ricardo Gerardi, also wrote Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go. Ricardo is an amazingly smart, thoughtful, resourceful, and all-around wonderful person who has extensive knowledge of the Go programming language along with all things modern enterprises incorporate into their compute environments. Several months after my last book, Portable Python Projects, was released, Ricardo and I got to talking about bringing the world of home automation to the Go programming community. With my background in IoT and Ricardo’s background in Go, it was a perfect match.
Ricardo and I began work on the book during the height of COVID. The pandemic not only made collaborating a bit trickier, it also put a severe constraint on easy access to hardware for Go, which drives the automation projects featured in the book. Because of these supply chain constraints, postponed work on the book until the component shortage eased up. After all, it wouldn’t be a rewarding learning experience for readers without the hardware components needed to run the projects. Fortunately, this delay worked in our favor since the Raspberry Pi organization just released a nice, beefy upgrade to their Raspberry Pi flagship model. The faster processor and expanded hardware capabilities of the recently released Raspberry Pi 5 make the projects in the book absolutely fly, as well as doubling down on their reliability.
Working with Ricardo has been a blast. I’ve learned so much more about the Go programming language from him that it is my programming language of choice. If you’re interested in checking out what Ricardo and I created, visit the book’s website at https://pragprog.com/titles/gohome.
📢 If you read Automate Your Home Using Go while it is still in beta, please share your thoughts, ask questions, and submit errata on the book’s page on DevTalk. You’ll also find a promo code that saves you 35 percent on the ebook.
