JSON

In a world in which the majority of data is accessed via the web, and most engineering organizations implement some number of microservices, we are going to encounter data in JSON format fairly frequently. We may only need to deal with it when pulling some random data from an API, or it might actually be the primary data format that drives our analytics and machine learning workflows.

Typically, JSON is used when ease of use is the primary goal of data interchange. Since JSON is human readable, it is easy to debug if something breaks. Remember that we want to maintain the integrity of our data handling as we process data with Go, and part of that process is ensuring that, when possible, our data is interpretable and readable. JSON turns out to be very useful in achieving these goals (which is why it is also used for logging, in many cases).

Go offers really great JSON functionality in its standard library with encoding/json. We will utilize this standard library functionality throughout the book.