Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ritesh Modi
Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ritesh Modi

Overview of this book

Solidity is a high-level language for writing smart contracts, and the syntax has large similarities with JavaScript, thereby making it easier for developers to learn, design, compile, and deploy smart contracts on large blockchain ecosystems including Ethereum and Polygon among others. This book guides you in understanding Solidity programming from scratch. The book starts with step-by-step instructions for the installation of multiple tools and private blockchain, along with foundational concepts such as variables, data types, and programming constructs. You’ll then explore contracts based on an object-oriented paradigm, including the usage of constructors, interfaces, libraries, and abstract contracts. The following chapters help you get to grips with testing and debugging smart contracts. As you advance, you’ll learn about advanced concepts like assembly programming, advanced interfaces, usage of recovery, and error handling using try-catch blocks. You’ll also explore multiple design patterns for smart contracts alongside developing secure smart contracts, as well as gain a solid understanding of writing upgradable smart concepts and data modeling. Finally, you’ll discover how to create your own ERC20 and NFT tokens from scratch. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Fundamentals of Solidity and Ethereum
7
Part 2: Writing Robust Smart Contracts
13
Part 3: Advanced Smart Contracts

Stoppable/haltable smart contract pattern

The next pattern we will discuss is used heavily with smart contracts related to ICOs. We all know that smart contracts deployed on public Ethereum can be accessed by anyone. Thus, these contracts can be subjected to multiple types of hacking attacks. There have been several occasions, either because of the shortcomings of a smart contract or the hacker being able to find vulnerabilities, where smart contracts have been hacked, their balances siphoned off, and even the ownership being changed to some other externally owned account. We also know that smart contracts are immutable and there is no way they can be deactivated or activated at will. At such times, it is important that the smart contract execution can be stopped to minimize losses. The pattern we will discuss next is known as the haltable, stoppable, or pausable pattern.

This pattern stops the execution of functions within a smart contract and can resume the execution after the...