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

Known attack patterns

On the Ethereum blockchain, many hacks occurred between the years 2017 and 2018, and they continue happening because of buggy contract code. In the year 2018 only, more than $1 billion worth of ether and tokens got stolen from Ethereum smart contracts due to vulnerabilities present in the code that attackers exploited. These hacks happened because of bad coding practices and a lack of testing of the contracts.

Looking at how those hacks happened, there have been many attack patterns that have been identified. It is the developer's responsibility to check their code for all of these known attack patterns. If these attack patterns are not prevented, there could be a loss of money (ether/tokens) or the attacker could enforce unintended transactions on the contracts.

Always keep yourself updated with the new features added in the Ethereum hard-forks or...