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

Debugging


Debugging is an important exercise when authoring Solidity smart contracts. Debugging refers to finding issues, bugs, and removing them by changing code. It is very difficult to debug a smart contract if there is in adequate support from tools and utilities. Generally, debugging involves executing each line of code step by step, finding the current state of temporary, local, and global variables and walking through each instruction while executing contracts.

There are the following ways to debug Solidity contracts:

  • Using the Remix editor
  • Events
  • Block explorer

The Remix editor

We used the Remix editor to write Solidity contracts in the previous chapters. However, we have not used the debugging utility available in Remix. The Remix debugger helps us observe the runtime behavior of contract execution and identify issues. The debugger works in Solidity and the resultant contract bytecode. With the debugger, the execution can be paused to examine contract code, state variables, local variables...