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

Writing a simple contract


A contract is declared using the contract keyword along with an identifier, as shown in the following code snippet:

contract SampleContract {
}

Within the brackets comes the declaration of state variables and function definitions. A complete definition of contract was discussed in Chapter 3, Introducing Solidity, and I am providing it again for quick reference. This contract has state variables, struct definitions, enum declarations, function definitions, modifiers, and events. State variables, structs, and enums were discussed in detail in Chapter 4, Global Variables and Functions. Functions, modifiers, and events will be discussed in detail over the next two chapters. Take a look at the following screenshot of a code snippet depicting contract: