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

Understanding Solidity and Solidity files

Solidity is a programming language that has similarities with JavaScript. Solidity is a statically-typed Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) language. Solidity is case-sensitive, and variables should use the same case during its definition and usage. The statement terminator in Solidity is the semicolon – ;.

Solidity code is written in Solidity files that have the .sol extension. They are human-readable text files that can be opened as text files in any editor, including Notepad.

A Solidity file is composed of the following four high-level constructs:

  • Pragma
  • Comments
  • Import
  • Contract/library/interface

Let's have a look at each in brief.

Pragma

Pragma is generally the first line of code within any Solidity file. It is a directive that specifies the target compiler version to be used for compiling the current Solidity file. Solidity is a new language and is subject to continuous improvement on...