Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By : Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By: Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders. It is the main technical innovation of Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain Developer's Guide takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology. It begins with the basic design of a blockchain and elaborates concepts, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and other related terminologies. You will then explore the components of Ethereum, such as Ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts that you need to build simple DApps. Blockchain Developer's Guide also explains why you must specifically use Solidity for Ethereum-based projects and lets you explore different blockchains with easy-to-follow examples. You will learn a wide range of concepts - beginning with cryptography in cryptocurrencies and including ether security, mining, and smart contracts. You will learn how to use web sockets and various API services for Ethereum. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be able to build efficient decentralized applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Blockchain Quick Reference by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt • Building Blockchain Projects by Narayan Prusty
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Compiling and deploying contracts


Ethereum provides the solc compiler, which provides a command-line interface to compile .sol files. Visit http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/installing-solidity.html#binary-packages  to find instructions to install it and visit https://Solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/using-the-compiler.html  to find instructions on how to use it. We won't be using the solc compiler directly; instead, we will be using solcjs and Solidity browser. Solcjs allows us to compile Solidity programmatically in Node.js, whereas browser Solidity is an IDE, which is suitable for small contracts.

For now, let's just compile the preceding contract using a browser Solidity provided by Ethereum. Learn more about it at https://Ethereum.github.io/browser-Solidity/. You can also download this browser Solidity source code and use it offline. Visit https://github.com/Ethereum/browser-Solidity/tree/gh-pages  to download it.

A major advantage of using this browser Solidity is that it provides...