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

Summary


This is the first chapter that has explored Solidity in depth. This chapter introduced Solidity, the layout of Solidity files including elements that can be declared at the top level in it. Constructs li pragma, contracts, and elements of contracts were discussed for a layout perspective. A complete immersion into the world of Solidity data types forms the core of this chapter. Value types and reference types were discussed in depth along with types like int, uint, fixed sized byte arrays, bytes, arrays, strings, structures, enumerations, addresses, boolean, and mappings were discussed in great length along with examples. Solidity provides additional data locations from complex types such as structs and arrays, which were also discussed in depth along with rules that govern their usage.

In the next chapter, we will focus on using some out-of-box variables and functions of smart contracts. Solidity provides numerous global variables and functions to help ease the task of obtaining...