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

Boolean


Solidity, like any programming language, provides a boolean data type. The bool data type can be used to represent scenarios that have binary results, such as true or false, 1 or 0, and so on. The valid values for this data type are true and false. It is to be noted that bools in Solidity cannot be converted to integers, as they can in other programming languages. It's a value type and any assignment to other boolean variables creates a new copy. The default value for bool in Solidity is false.

A bool data type is declared and assigned a value as shown in the following code:

bool isPaid = true;

It can be modified within contracts and can be used in both incoming and outgoing parameters and the return value, as shown in the following screenshot: