Chapter 1, Blockchain Basics, will serve as a warm-up session about blockchain before we deep dive into Ethereum and smart contract development. To really appreciate blockchain, we must understand the two founding pillars on which blockchain as a technology is firmly grounded: distributed systems and cryptography. Once we have covered these two core concepts, we try to understand a blockchain from two different perspectives: as a software developer and as a trader of financial instruments. Then we probe into the internal logical architecture of a block in the blockchain, focusing the bitcoin block structure, and get a gentle introduction to the mining and forking process. We conclude the chapter by discussing how blockchain has evolved in recent years and clearly marking out its current position in the technological hype cycle.
Chapter 2, Grokking Ethereum, will help us to understand the meaning of decentralization and whether Ethereum is truly decentralized. We will also cover its core technological stack and get familiarized with various jargon, such as Mist, EVM, Swarm, Whisper, Ether, and Gas. We will briefly discuss the notion of a Turing-complete language. We'll then revisit forking, mining, and block architecture from the perspective of Ethereum. We'll end this chapter by getting a notion of Ethereum wallets and client interfaces, which will serve as a firm base for smart contract development.
Chapter 3, The Hello World of Ethereum Smart Contract, provides a hands-on guide to developing our first smart contract. As an unspoken tradition of a software developer, we start with a "Hello World" program. Then we try some basic arithmetic increment and decrement operations using a contract. We then learn how to code a loop inside a smart contract and how to raise an issue in GitHub. We end this chapter by creating our own private blockchain right from the genesis block, attach it with Geth, and use the Mist browser to deploy one of the smart contracts we studied in this chapter, after mining some ethers.
Chapter 4, A Noob's Guide to DApps and DAOs, develops our understanding towards decentralized applications from a developer's perspective. We introduce the high-level steps to develop a decentralized application. Then we explore a unique marketplace called ethercast, which serves as an aggregator of several DApps. We then move on to design a decentralized autonomous organization. We conclude this chapter with a retrospection of the infamous DAO hack, which led to the ETH/ETC split, from a purely technical perspective.
Chapter 5, Deep-Diving into Smart Contracts, digs deeper into smart contract designs. We start by understanding the textbook definition of a smart contract. Then we move on to understand different smart contract models and the role of code in a smart contract. We go through the basic anatomy of a smart contract and see how a smart contract works. Then we shift our focus to advanced topics such as smart contract optimization, auditing, and ERC20 compliance. We conclude the chapter with a hands-on drill of building a voting DApp.
Chapter 6, Solidity in Depth, is all about the Turing complete solidity language on the Ethereum blockchain. We will start by probing into the design decision of why we really need a new language like solidity. The next sections will cover the nuances of the solidity language and the basic syntax used in it. Specifically, we'll cover contract-oriented features, functions and events, inheritance, libraries, expressions, control structures, units, and variables. Then we'll look at the optimizer and debugging options. We will conclude this chapter by analyzing the code flaw that led to the recent parity wallet hack in the Ethereum blockchain, which stole around $30 million worth of ethers.
Chapter 7, Primer on Web3.js, introduces a special application programming interface library written in JavaScript. This interface connects our web browser with the Ethereum blockchain node. We will begin this chapter by understanding the difference between Geth, Web3.js, and Mist. Then we will learn how to import this API library and get connected with Geth. We will then explore the API structure inside the web3.js library. We'll conclude the chapter by studying the design of an ownership contract.
Chapter 8, Developing Cryptocurrency from Scratch, provides a hands-on tutorial to develop an ERC20 standardized token using the Truffle framework. We then dive in to the concepts of initial coin offering (ICO) and how to identify genuine ICOs among fake and Ponzi schemes. The chapter concludes by discussing various token conversion process and pair-trading concepts.
Chapter 9, Enterprise Use Cases, provides some exciting and promising use cases of Ethereum smart contracts. We also discuss the design of a decentralized micro-blogging platform using solidity.
Chapter 10, BaaS and the Dark Web Market, introduce us to the blockchain framework of Microsoft and IBM. We conclude this chapter by discussing the difference between the Conventional Web and the Dark Web (.onion website and TOR) and how to safely browse the Dark Web to find use cases of cryptocurrencies.
Chapter 11, Advanced Topics and the Road Ahead, deals with exciting topics such as graph-based DLTS with a focus on Tangle, quantum secured blockchain, Ethereum improvement protocols, consortium blockchains, distributed autonomous societies, and common design patterns for solidity.
