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

Exploring data types in Solidity

Every value used in Solidity is of a type, which determines the kind of value it can store. This helps Solidity to use the value based on the rules of that type. Solidity is a statically typed language, and this ensures that the compiler knows the type during compilation itself. Solidity data types can broadly be classified into the following two types:

  • Value types
  • Reference types

These two types in Solidity differ, based on the way they are assigned to a variable and stored in the EVM. Assigning a variable to another variable can be done by creating a new copy or just by copying the reference. Value types maintain independent copies of variables, and changing the value in one variable does not affect the value in another variable. However, changing values in reference type variables ensures that anybody referring to those variables gets an update value.

Value types

A type is referred to as a value type if it holds the data...