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

Chapter 13. Solidity 101

In the previous chapter, we discussed Solidity—the programming language introduced by the Ethereum foundation. Solidity is the language that makes it possible to create decentralized applications on top of Ethereum blockchain, either to be used for creating another cryptocurrency token or for any other use case in which blockchain can have an essential role. 

Ethereum runs smart contracts on its platform; these are applications that use blockchain technology to perform the required action, enabling users to create their own blockchain and also issue their own alternative cryptocurrency. This is made possible by coding in Solidity, which is a contract-oriented programming language used for writing smart contracts that are to be executed on the Ethereum blockchain and perform the programmed tasks.

Solidity is a statically typed programming language that runs on the Ethereum virtual machine. It is influenced by C++, Python, and JavaScript, was proposed in August 2014...