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

Literals


Solidity provides usage of literal for assignments to variables. Literals do not have names; they are the values themselves. Variables can change their values during a program execution, but a literal remains the same value throughout. Take a look at the following examples of various literals:

  • Examples of integer literal are 1, 10, 1,000, -1, and -100.
  • Examples of string literals are "Ritesh" and 'Modi'. String literals can be in single or double quotes.
  • Examples of address literals are 0xca35b7d915458ef540ade6068dfe2f44e8fa733c and 0x1111111111111111111111111111111111111111.
  • Hexadecimal literals are prefixed with the hex keyword. An example of hexadecimal literals is hex"1A2B3F".
  • Solidity supports decimal literals with use of dot. Examples include 4.5 and 0.2.