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

Ethereum Virtual Machine


Solidity is a programming language targeting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Ethereum blockchain helps extend its functionality by writing and executing code known as smart contracts. We will get into the details of smart contracts in subsequent chapters, but for now, it is enough to know that smart contracts are similar to object-oriented classes written in Java or C++.

EVM executes code that is part of smart contracts. Smart contracts are written in Solidity; however, EVM does not understand the high-level constructs of Solidity. EVM understands lower-level instructions called bytecode.

Solidity code needs a compiler to take its code and convert it into bytecode that is understandable by EVM. Solidity comes with a compiler to do this job, known as the Solidity compiler or solc. We downloaded and installed the Solidity compiler in the last chapter using the Node.js npm command

The entire process is shown in the following diagram, from writing code in Solidity to...