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

Gas


In the previous section, it was mentioned that fees are paid using Ether for any execution that changes state in Ethereum. Ether is traded on public exchanges and its price fluctuates daily. If Ether is used for paying fees, then the cost of using the same service could be very high on certain days and low on other days. People will wait for the price of Ether to fall to execute their transactions. This is not ideal for a platformsuch as Ethereum. Gas helps in alleviating this problem. Gas is the internal currency of Ethereum. The execution and resource utilization cost is predetermined in Ethereum in terms of gas units. This is also known as gas cost. There is also gas price that can be adjusted to a lower price when the price of Ether increases and a higher price when the price of Ether decreases. For example, to invoke a function in a contract that modifies a string will cost gas, which is predetermined, and users should pay in terms of gas to ensure smooth execution of this transaction.