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

Constructors


Solidity supports declaring a constructor within a contract. Constructors are optional in Solidity and the compiler induces a default constructor when no constructor is explicitly defined. The constructor is executed once while deploying the contract. This is quite different from other programming languages. In other programming languages, a constructor is executed whenever a new object instance is created. However, in Solidity, a constructor is executed are deployed on EVM. Constructors should be used for initializing state variables and, generally, writing extensive Solidity code should be avoided. The constructor code is the first set of code that is executed for a contract. There can be at most one constructor in a contract, unlike constructors in other programming languages. Constructors can take parameters and arguments should be supplied while deploying the contract.

A constructor has the same name as that of the contract. Both the names should be the same. A constructor...