Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Why blockchains?


The main objective of Ethereum is to accept transactions from accounts, update their state, and maintain this state as current till another transaction updates it again. The whole process of accepting, executing, and writing transactions can be divided into two phases in Ethereum. There is a decoupling between when a transaction is accepted by Ethereum and when the transaction is executed and written to the ledger. This decoupling is quite important for decentralization and distributed architecture to work as expected.

Blockchain helps primarily in the following three different ways:

  • Trust: Blockchain helps in creating applications that are decentralized and collectively owned by multiple people. Nobody within this group has the power to change or delete previous transactions. Even if someone tries to do so, it will not be accepted by other stakeholders.
  • Autonomy: There is no single owner for blockchain-based applications. No one controls the blockchain, but everyone participates in its activities. This helps in creating solutions that cannot be manipulated or induce corruption.
  • Intermediaries: Blockchain-based applications can help remove the intermediaries from existing processes. Generally there is a central body, such as vehicle registration, license issuing, and so on, that acts as registrar for registering vehicles as well as issuing driver licenses. Without blockchain-based systems, there is no central body and if a license is issued or vehicle is registered after a blockchain mining process, that will remain a fact for an epoch time-period without the need of any central authority vouching for it.

Blockchain is heavily dependent on cryptography technologies as we discuss in the following section.