Solidity Programming Essentials

3.6 (10)

Buy this Book

Solidity Programming Essentials

3.6 (10)

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Free Chapter

Introduction to Blockchain, Ethereum, and Smart Contracts

What is a blockchain?

Why blockchains?

Cryptography

Ether

Gas

Blockchain and Ethereum architecture

Ethereum nodes

Ethereum accounts

Transactions

Blocks

An end-to-end transaction

What is a contract?

What is a smart contract?

How are contracts deployed?

Summary

Installing Ethereum and Solidity

Ethereum networks

Geth

Creating a private network

ganache-cli

Solidity compiler

The web3 JavaScript library

Mist wallet

MetaMask

Summary

Introducing Solidity

Ethereum Virtual Machine

Solidity and Solidity files

Structure of a contract

Data types in Solidity

Storage and memory data locations

Literals

Integers

Boolean

The byte data type

Arrays

Structure of an array

Enumerations

Address

Mappings

Summary

Global Variables and Functions

The var type variables

Variables hoisting

Variable scoping

Type conversion

Block and transaction global variables

Cryptography global variables

Address global variables

Contract global variables

Summary

Expressions and Control Structures

Solidity expressions

The if decision control

The while loop

The for loop

The do...while loop

The break statement

The continue statement

The return statement

Summary

Writing Smart Contracts

Smart contracts

Writing a simple contract

Creating contracts

Constructors

Contract composition

Inheritance

Encapsulation

Polymorphism

Method overriding

Abstract contracts

Interfaces

Summary

Functions, Modifiers, and Fallbacks

Function input and output

Modifiers

The view, constant, and pure functions

The address functions

The fallback function

Summary

Exceptions, Events, and Logging

Error handling

Events and logging

Summary

Truffle Basics and Unit Testing

Application development life cycle management

Truffle

Development with Truffle

Testing with Truffle

Summary

Debugging Contracts

Debugging

Using a Block Explorer

Summary

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ganache-cli

There are following two distinct phases in the overall modification and writing of transactions to a ledger using Ethereum:

The first stage is about creating a transaction and putting the transaction in a transaction pool.
The second phase that happens periodically is to get all transactions from a transaction pool and mine them. Mining here means writing those transactions to the Ethereum database or ledger.

From this description, it would be a time-consuming process if the same process is used for development and testing purposes. To ease the process of development and test of solutions and smart contracts on Ethereum, ganache-cli was created. It was earlier known as TestRPC. ganache-cli by itself contains both the Ethereum transaction processing and mining functionality. Moreover, there is no waiting period for mining of transactions. The transactions are...