Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Book Image

Solidity Programming Essentials

Overview of this book

Solidity is a contract-oriented language whose syntax is highly influenced by JavaScript, and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Solidity Programming Essentials will be your guide to understanding Solidity programming to build smart contracts for Ethereum and blockchain from ground-up. We begin with a brief run-through of blockchain, Ethereum, and their most important concepts or components. You will learn how to install all the necessary tools to write, test, and debug Solidity contracts on Ethereum. Then, you will explore the layout of a Solidity source file and work with the different data types. The next set of recipes will help you work with operators, control structures, and data structures while building your smart contracts. We take you through function calls, return types, function modifers, and recipes in object-oriented programming with Solidity. Learn all you can on event logging and exception handling, as well as testing and debugging smart contracts. By the end of this book, you will be able to write, deploy, and test smart contracts in Ethereum. This book will bring forth the essence of writing contracts using Solidity and also help you develop Solidity skills in no time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The web3 JavaScript library


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 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 the node package manager as a node module like the Solidity compiler. At the time of writing, the latest version of web3 is broken and does not install appropriately because of the missing BigNumber.js file. However, previous stable versions can be used for connecting web applications to backend Ethereum nodes. 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 [email protected]

The preceding command generates the following output:

  1. After web3 is installed, it can be used using Node.js. From Command Prompt, enter the node workspace by executing the...