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

Installing the web3 framework

The web3 library is an open source JavaScript library that can be used to connect to Ethereum nodes from the same or a remote computer. It allows IPC as well as an RPC to connect to Ethereum nodes. web3 is a client-side library and can be used alongside a web page and query, and can submit transactions to Ethereum nodes. It can be installed using npm as a node module like the Solidity compiler. Let's take a look at the following steps to install the web3 JavaScript library:

  1. The command used to install web3 is as follows:
    npm install web3

The preceding command generates the following output:

Figure 2.17 – Installing the web3 JavaScript framework

  1. After web3 is installed, it can be used using the Node.js REPL. From Command Prompt, enter the Node.js workspace by executing the node command, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.18 – Starting a node session...