Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun
Book Image

Blockchain Quick Start Guide

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Weimin Sun

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a technology that powers the development of decentralized applications.This technology allows the construction of a network with no single control that enables participants to make contributions to and receive benefits from the network directly. This book will give you a thorough overview of blockchain and explain how a blockchain works.You will begin by going through various blockchain consensus mechanisms and cryptographic hash functions. You will then learn the fundamentals of programming in Solidity – the defacto language for developing decentralize, applications in Ethereum. After that, you will set up an Ethereum development environment and develop, package, build, and test campaign-decentralized applications.The book also shows you how to set up Hyperledger composer tools, analyze business scenarios, design business models, and write a chain code. Finally, you will get a glimpse of how blockchain is actually used in different real-world domains. By the end of this guide, you will be comfortable working with basic blockchain frameworks, and develop secure, decentralized applications in a hassle-free manner.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Smart contract security


Once a smart contract has been deployed on the Ethereum network, it is immutable and public to everyone. Many of the smart contract functions are account payment related; therefore, security and testing become absolutely essential for a contract before being deployed on the main network. Following are security practices that will help you better design and write flawless Ethereum smart contracts.

Keep contract simple and modular

Try to keep your smart contract small, simple, and modularized. Complicated code is difficult to read, understand, and debug, it is also error-prone.

Use well-written library tools where possible.

Limit the amount of local variables.

Move unrelated functionality to other contracts or libraries.

Use the checks-effects-interactions pattern

Be very careful when interacting with other external contracts, it should be the last step in your function. It can introduce several unexpected risks or errors. External calls may execute malicious code. These kinds...