Book Image

Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity

By : Jitendra Chittoda
Book Image

Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity

By: Jitendra Chittoda

Overview of this book

Solidity is among the most popular and contract-oriented programming languages used for writing decentralized applications (DApps) on Ethereum blockchain. If you’re looking to perfect your skills in writing professional-grade smart contracts using Solidity, this book can help. You will get started with a detailed introduction to blockchain, smart contracts, and Ethereum, while also gaining useful insights into the Solidity programming language. A dedicated section will then take you through the different Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC) standards, including ERC-20, ERC-223, and ERC-721, and demonstrate how you can choose among these standards while writing smart contracts. As you approach later chapters, you will cover the different smart contracts available for use in libraries such as OpenZeppelin. You’ll also learn to use different open source tools to test, review and improve the quality of your code and make it production-ready. Toward the end of this book, you’ll get to grips with techniques such as adding security to smart contracts, and gain insights into various security considerations. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to write secure, production-ready smart contracts in Solidity from scratch for decentralized applications on Ethereum blockchain.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Blockchain, Ethereum, and Solidity
5
Section 2: Deep Dive into Development Tools
9
Section 3: Mastering ERC Standards and Libraries
16
Section 4: Design Patterns and Best Practices

Understanding upgradable contracts

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Blockchain, we discussed how, on the Ethereum blockchain, once a Solidity smart contract is deployed, it cannot be changed. Because smart contracts are immutable, only the states of the variables can be changed by an authorized person. We also discussed how, because of the immutability of contract code, it is very important to not have any bugs left in contract code, since this could cause issues later, once the code is deployed to production.

Because of the immutability of contracts, there have been many attacks happened in the past on smart contracts. Once an attacker identifies bugs in contracts with funds, they exploit the bugs and vulnerabilities present in the contract and steal the funds. One famous hack was the Parity MultiSig hack, in which an attacker was able to become the owner of the contract and steal...