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

The address functions


In the chapter relating to data types, we purposely did not explain the functions related to the address data type. Although these functions could have been covered there, some of these functions can execute a fallback function automatically, and hence it is covered here.

Address provides five functions and a single property.

The only property provided by address is the balance property, which provides the balance available in an account (contract or individual) in wei, as shown in the following code snippet:

<<account>>.balance ;

In the preceding code, account is a valid Ethereum address and this returns the balance available in this in terms of wei.

Now, let's take a look at the methods provided by an account.

The send method

The send method is used to send Ether to a contract or to an individually owned account. Take a look at the following code depicting the send method:

<<account>>.send(amount);

The send function provides 2,300 gas as a fixed limit...