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 if decision control


Solidity provides conditional code execution with the help of the if...else instructions. The general structure of if...else is as follows:

if (this condition/expression is true) {
Execute the instructions here
} 
else if (this condition/expression is true) {
   Execute the instructions here
} 
else {
   Execute the instructions here
}

if and if-else  are keywords in Solidity and they inform the compiler that they contain a decision control condition, for example, if (a > 10). Here, if contains a condition that can evaluate to either true or false.  If a > 10 evaluates to true then the code instructions that follow in the pair of double-brackets ({) and (}) should be executed.

else is also a keyword that provides an alternate path if none of the previous conditions are true. It also contains a decision control instruction and executes the code instructions if a > 10 tends to be true.

The following example shows the usage of 'IF'-'ELSE IF' - 'ELSE' conditions...