welcome

Throughout this book, you will put on many hats—one of a systems architect, one of a backend developer, and one of a DevOps engineer—all to give you the full picture of WebAssembly development beyond its innate browser domain.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores WebAssembly under the hood, providing you with the tools to understand and debug complex scenarios. Part 2 is the meat and potatoes of it all, designed to help you develop production-grade applications that leverage WebAssembly's benefits. Finally, part 3 teaches you how to share your WebAssembly applications with the world by using WebAssembly containers and ensuring scalability with Kubernetes integration. By the end of it, you should know how to develop and deploy WebAssembly all the way to the edge.

As you read Server-side WebAssembly, you will learn by doing. Topics are frequently explained via example, and throughout the book, we will work on a big project, progressively building on it with each new skill you acquire.

In closing, I'd just like to highlight that WebAssembly gives me the unique advantage to be able to write examples in multiple programming languages. This being the case, we often switch between languages like Rust, JavaScript, and Python, with a bit of an emphasis on Rust. Extensive knowledge of these languages is not required, and you are even free to try the examples with your preferred language.