[sagichmal]

Go definitely shines as a server language, so I think some kind of server is indeed the best way to illustrate Go's capabilities. It's true that net/http is kind of... boring, and maybe not the best choice for a beginner tutorial due to some of its quirks, but it has the benefit of being a well-understood reference point.

[enneff]

In reality, this tutorial is about making the API calls and decoding their JSON responses, and then introducing some concurrency to do multiple calls in parallel. The HTTP portion of this tutorial functions as some familiar ground for newbies, a nice way to get a grasp of the Go style in a context that many people understand.